VANCOUVER – If hockey was horse racing, the Vancouver Canucks and Edmonton Oilers would make a pretty good joint entry.
A bet on both would pay off if either wins one of the wild-card spots in the National Hockey League playoff race. Even in the rather motley seven-horse field in the Western Conference, in the slow, sloppy race run to this point, the Canucks are Oilers would be a good bet.
Both have upside, the Canucks because they’re a young, improving team led by three star forwards in their early 20s, will finally be healthy when Calder Trophy favourite Elias Pettersson returns to the lineup any day now, and have a far better schedule in the second half of the season than the torture test Vancouver endured into January.
And you like the Oilers because, well, you know why. Connor McDavid is the best player in the world. That alone is enough some nights, and we get the feeling interim coach Ken Hitchcock will eventually find all the buttons to push to get enough from the rest of the team for Edmonton to cross the finish line.
Of course, both teams could collapse and end up at the bottom of the field.
But right now, the Oilers and Canucks – as a joint entry – look capable of beating enough of the under-achieving teams around them for one to make the playoffs.
Theoretically, how they would play in April could look a lot like how they played each other here Wednesday, when their proximity in the standings and the NHL map generated intensity and puck battles you don’t equate with mid-week games in January.
When Oilers forward Alex Chiasson scored the only goal in a five-round shootout to give Edmonton a 3-2 victory at Rogers Arena, he celebrated like he’d just scored a playoff overtime winner.
It wasn’t always great hockey, but it was a great game.
“It was a really a good game, a fun game to be a part of too, even though we lost,” veteran Canuck Jay Beagle, who won a Stanley Cup with Washington last June, said. “It was obviously a really big game. You could tell right from the drop of the puck, it was two teams in the playoff hunt. It’s a game that we’ve got to build off.”
The Canucks have done a lot of building this season, performing better than most people expected.
Vancouver coach Travis Green talks constantly about developing players he can win with. Wednesday morning’s reference was in regards to talented winger Nikolay Goldobin, a healthy scratch for the third time in six games.
The Canucks missed Pettersson. The rookie who leads the team in scoring skated Wednesday morning and could play Friday against the Buffalo Sabres for the first time since spraining his knee two weeks ago.
Including the game Pettersson was hurt, Vancouver has just one win in five games (1-2-2) without him. To make room on their roster for the 20-year-old’s return, the Canucks traded extra defenceman Michael Del Zotto to the Anaheim Ducks for a seventh-round pick and Luke Schenn, who will report to Vancouver’s minor-league team in Utica.
Still, the Canucks battled again Wednesday without their best player.
“I thought our young guys played well,” centre Brandon Sutter said after spending his night trying to check McDavid at even strength. “They were in the fight the whole time. That’s the effort we’re going to need down the stretch in this playoff race we’re in. Every game is going to feel a lot like that. I like how we responded.
“It was just a tough-checking game, kind of like a playoff game in that sense. Once you get to a shootout, it’s always a coin flip. But I liked a lot of things we did.”
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The Oilers, who won for the fifth time in eight games after losing six straight, moved one point clear of the Canucks and into a tie with the Minnesota Wild for the final playoff spot in the conference. Just three points separate the five teams at the top of the wild-card race.
The Canucks were badly outshot in the first half of the game, including 11-5 in the opening period. And yet they outnumbered the Oilers on the Edmonton goals that put Vancouver down 2-1 after 20 minutes.
On the game’s first power play, the Oilers attacked shorthanded two-against-four, yet made it 1-0 at 7:35 on some ambivalent Canucks defending. Oiler Jujhar Khaira spun away from Bo Horvat with the puck as Canucks defenceman Alex Edler spun away to check another player. And as Canucks Brock Boeser and Josh Leivo watched, Khaira scored from the slot.
The Canucks struck back on the same power play, tying the game at 8:53 when Sutter’s shot through Jake Virtanen’s screen beat Oilers goalie Mikko Koskinen at his near post.
It looked like Vancouver would escape the period level, but at 19:03 McDavid did a McDavid thing, attacking the Canucks one-on-three amid a change of Vancouver penalty killers before rifling a wrist shot through defenceman Chris Tanev and past goalie Jacob Markstrom.
The shot disparity had increased to 16-6 for the Oilers when the Canucks tied it 2-2 at 8:53 of the second period, Markus Granlund collecting Caleb Jones’ giveaway in the Oilers’ slot and spinning and firing over Koskinen’s shoulder.
Despite getting outplayed, the Canucks actually took the lead at 18:54 before Ben Hutton’s short-side screened shot (almost identical to Sutter’s) was wiped out for offside on a coach’s challenge. The review showed Virtanen, heading to the bench on a change, just inside the Edmonton blue line when Sutter crossed with the puck about 30 seconds before Hutton’s goal.
Markstrom and Koskinen took over from there.
If the Canucks compete for the rest of the season like they have on this homestand, they may actually see real playoff games this season.
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