EDMONTON — Dream start. Nightmare finish.
And so another NHL season begins for the Vancouver Canucks, a team with talent and promise that is striving to become something more substantial.
They should have had more Wednesday, overwhelming the Edmonton Oilers in the first 21 minutes to build a three-goal lead, only to blow it on special teams and surrender five straight goals in a 5-3 loss on opening night.
Connor McDavid, largely invisible in the first half of the game, finished with a hat trick. He and Leon Draisaitl won a game for the Oilers their team should have lost. That’s what special players do.
The Canucks have 81 games remaining — an enormous time to fix their mistakes and build the structure and consistency into their play that is necessary for them to return to the playoffs for just the second time since 2015.
But Wednesday was a reminder of the work to do.
Good teams don’t blow 3-0 leads and get nothing from a game in which they were significantly superior than the opposition at even strength.
“That obviously stings a little bit,” Canucks captain Bo Horvat said. “I thought we did a lot of good things five on five. I thought for the majority of the game we carried the play. Obviously, our power play let us down a little bit. (But) it’s been one game and we'll move on.”
Forward J.T. Miller lamented: “They didn't have anything, really. Five on five, we controlled the play the entire game. We had a couple of breakdowns, maybe two or three. Playing a team like that, you'll take that any day. I think we played really well and we're going to hang our hat on that. Stuff from tonight is fixable, that's for sure.”
McDavid broke a 3-3 tie with 4:59 remaining in regulation, banging his own rebound past goalie Thatcher Demko after Canucks defenceman Quinn Hughes had his shot blocked inside the Edmonton blue line, then got caught on the wrong side of the puck and Oiler Zach Hyman when a three-on-two developed in the Vancouver zone.
McDavid finished his hat trick into an empty net with 25 seconds remaining, technically Edmonton’s third power-play goal of the night. They needed just four advantages and total of 1:49 on the power play to scorch the Canucks' penalty killing, which was one of the torpedoes that sunk Vancouver in the first six weeks of last season.
The Canucks' power play went 1-for-8, and inexcusably allowed a shorthanded three-on-one rush that Darnell Nurse turned into the tying goal with 41 seconds remaining in the middle period.
“Disappointing,” Canucks defenceman Oliver Ekman-Larsson said. “I thought we came out really good in the first and I think special teams kind of cost us the game tonight. The power play wasn't good enough and we couldn't keep the puck out of our net on the PK.
“I think that was a good lesson for us. That's the type of game ... that you need to be able to close out.”
The Canucks need to move beyond learning lessons and moral victories this season. They move on to Philadelphia to play John Tortorella’s Flyers on Saturday.
“I don't know if it feels more important or more critical,” Vancouver coach Bruce Boudreau said Wednesday morning when asked about the start of the season. “They just definitely know what happened when they didn't have a good start (last year). I mean, our last 56 games, I think we were 10th in the league, and it still didn't get us anywhere. We will all lose two, three, four games in a row. But I mean, if you do that and you start off bad, you're deeper into (trouble). But if you have that little cushion, I mean, it makes life a lot easier.”
The Canucks had a big cushion against the Oilers, building a 3-0 lead through 21 minutes.
Miller and Pettersson finished beautifully from Edmonton turnovers to make it 2-0 in the first 2:40 of the game — the fastest 2-0 lead the Canucks have built on opening night in franchise history.
Rookie Andrei Kuzmenko added to the lead just 39 seconds into the middle period, scoring on a goalmouth tap-in from Miller’s laser pass for Vancouver’s only power-play goal in 12:15 of advantage time.
A soft hooking call against Canuck Tanner Pearson at 3:54 of the middle period — we assume because both the score and power plays were 3-0 for Vancouver at that point and this is the NHL — gave the Oilers a chance to get in the game.
They did, as Draisaitl scored from short range at 4:12. The Canucks were justifiably upset the goal came a few seconds after Evander Kane lumbered Hughes across the face, bursting him like a tomato, without a call. Hughes was still trying to gather his equipment and wits when the puck went in.
But the Canucks could only blame themselves when McDavid made it 3-2 at 14:01, finishing from a sequence of quick passes after Vancouver was penalized at 13:55 for too many players.
At that point, the Canucks had yielded almost nothing at five-on-five but allowed the Oilers' power play to score two goals on two chances over a total of just 24 seconds.
Nurse tied it at 19:19 after Pettersson’s turnover and Horvat’s weak backcheck led to the shorthanded three-on-one.
Pettersson said after the morning skate the priority for the Canucks is to start from Game 1 like they played the final 57 games last year under Boudreau when they finished 32-15-10.
“We know what we can be when everybody is on top of their game and working the hardest,” Pettersson said. “It just comes down to doing our jobs.”
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