Canucks' Lotto Line doesn't skip a beat after being reunited

NEWARK, N.J. – You know who doesn’t like being called the Lotto Line? The Lotto Line.

Brock Boeser is so chill he doesn’t really care, but J.T. Miller hates it and Elias Pettersson would rather not be defined by a label.

So, Saturday night’s silly West Coast debate on social media – which is the predominant genre of discourse on social media – about whether the Vancouver Canucks’ Lotto Line was really a Lotto Line, since Miller was now the centre instead of Pettersson, missed an important point as the three stars were reunited.

First of all, of course it was a Lotto Line because Nos. 6-40-9 were back together (even if that was never their right-to-left numerical order when everyone heartily agreed they were the Lotto Line). Secondly, but maybe more importantly, labels are generally irrelevant and always secondary to actions.

Pettersson, Miller and Boeser were dominant in an impressive 6-4 victory over the New Jersey Devils, who hadn’t lost at home to the Canucks in a decade but in the first 25 minutes were outshot 26-6 and outscored 3-0 by Vancouver.

It should have been a blowout, but Devils goalie Nico Daws and two bad shifts by the Canucks halfway through the third period changed the narrative. But not the outcome.

Miller and Pettersson each scored twice and had an assist, Boeser had two assists and a disallowed goal, and the trio combined to go plus-14. Miller was plus-five as the Canucks dominated a team that had dominated them under the glamorous bright lights of Newark.

“You guys have the headline, so I'll leave it at that,” Pettersson said when asked about the “Lotto Line” reunification. “Obviously, we had chemistry a few years ago. It was good to be back.”

The line’s name – and history – is foreign to coach Rick Tocchet, who took over the Canucks less than 12 months ago but has guided his team this season to a 25-11-3 that would have been a fantasy three months ago.

After opening their season-long, seven-game road trip with a 2-1 loss Thursday against the St. Louis Blues, Tocchet decided to put his best three forwards together, moving Pettersson to left wing beside usual linemates Miller and Boeser.

“Yeah, somebody told me about it,” Tocchet said of the Lotto Line. “I don't know much about that stuff.

“Just why not put (them) together every once in a while? We'll see how long we keep it together, but sometimes it's a shot in the arm for the team.”

“Mentally for me, it's like nothing changed,” Miller said. “It's not like I went up to Petey, like, 'Let's make a shitload of plays today.’ Obviously, with a little bit more skill on the line, we can make a couple of more plays. That's all that happened. We held on to pucks a little longer, opened up a little bit more plays and we capitalized. Obviously, if you load up a line a little bit like that, we understand we're trying to get some production. But I don't think that we even need to talk about it. We expect that out of ourselves.”

The four goals Miller, Pettersson and Boeser generated in one game were half of what the trio had amassed over the previous 10 games.

After the Canucks somehow got nothing out of a first period in which they outshot the Devils 17-5, Pettersson deflected in Filip Hroenk’s point shot 41 seconds into the middle period, Miller hacked in a Boeser rebound to make it 2-0 at 3:33, and then wired a one-timer teed up by Pettersson’s cross-ice pass at 4:37.

“I think it just helped that we came out and had a really good first period together and we created a lot of chances,” Boeser said. “We just kind of put our work boots on. We wanted to do that tonight to get the team going.

“We're the leaders of the team and when you get put together, you need to be the line that drives guys to play and gets a team going. We said that before the game and I was happy with our effort.”

After Devils defencemen Colin Miller and Brendan Smith were left open above retreating Canuck forwards and scored less than two minutes apart in the third period to turn a 5-2 landslide into a 5-4 white-knuckler, we can’t call it one of the Canucks’ best games of the season. But the first 40 minutes, when high-danger scoring chances were 17-3 according to naturalstattrick.com, were outstanding for Vancouver.

When they play like they did, constantly forcing turnovers, moving pucks and their feet quickly, and getting to the opposition net with purpose, the Canucks are extremely difficult to beat.

“There was a lot of good things,” Miller said. “We competed like bastards for most of the game. Tracking was unreal, so our D could stay up. It created a lot of turnovers for them and caught them on some bad changes. And you could just feel the tide turn at that point and we capitalized on some looks. It was all from hard work. None of the goals were fancy. They were all going to the net, making plays.”

And yet, when it got to 5-4 with 7:06 to play, Tocchet burned his timeout to talk to his players and get some oxygen back in their brains.

“I think that's the point where the leaders on the team could step up, and the guys that have had some experience can step up and calm that situation down,” Miller explained. “You know, the moment's not bigger than it is; we just make it bigger than it is sometimes. It's a good learning thing for us. We're happy with getting a three-, four-goal lead in the game. That means you did a lot of good to get there. But you learn from some things in the third today.”

After Dakota Joshua took a careless holding penalty with 3:31 remaining that the Canucks expertly killed, the winger spun and scored into an empty net to clinch it with 71 seconds to go.

“It just feels good, you know, to win a road game on a big road trip,” Miller said. “I liked a lot of our game today. I think we all felt pretty good about most of it.”

• With Pettersson moved alongside Miller and Boeser, Tocchet bumped up the trio of Joshua, Teddy Blueger and Conor Garland, and formed a new line with Pius Suter between Ilya Mikheyev and Andrei Kuzmenko, who led the Canucks with six shots on net during 14:44 of ice time after being healthy-scratched in St. Louis. . . The Canucks have Sunday off in Manhattan before playing the New York Rangers and New York Islanders in back-to-back games starting Monday.