VANCOUVER – Curtis Lazar knew, logically, he was not responsible for the Vancouver Canucks losing their first seven games. And yet, it was only when he left the lineup on Oct. 27 with a hand injury, that the team won a few.
“Everyone's a little superstitious, right?” Lazar said after practising Sunday. “You've got these funky stats here and there. Everyone wants to be part of the solution; you don't want to be known as being part of the problem. So a little bit, it’s in the back of your mind.”
Not anymore.
In the eighth game since signing a three-year contract in July to return home to British Columbia and play for the Canucks, Lazar was finally part of a Vancouver win on Friday when his team beat the Los Angeles Kings 4-1 at Rogers Arena.
In his first game back from injury, Lazar led Vancouver with seven hits, including a second-period bone-rattler on Kings defenceman Sean Walker, whose retaliatory cross-check led to Brock Boeser’s power-play goal that helped speed the Canucks towards a second straight win.
They’ll make it a season-high winning streak if they beat the Vegas Golden Knights Monday at home.
“My first win as a Canuck,” Lazar, the 27-year-old from Vernon, smiled. “It was a long time coming. Honestly, every game is going to be special just because I have that connection (to the team). I had my parents and my grandparents come down for the game, which was special. Playing elsewhere, my grandparents are getting older and it was not that easy for them to kind of travel around. So for them to hop in the car and come down and see a game live, it was pretty cool.”
A 17th-overall draft pick of the Ottawa Senators in 2013, Lazar took years to establish himself in the NHL by figuring out how to play near the bottom of the lineup instead of at the top. The Canucks are his fifth NHL team.
General manager Patrik Allvin signed him as a free agent to give the Canucks some backbone and depth at centre, more experience and grit and some penalty-killing know-how. With the Canucks desperate to build a winning culture, management hoped Lazar would bring some with him from the Boston Bruins.
And then he got hurt. The start to this season was a worst-case scenario for both the Canucks and Lazar, who injured his hand in Game 2 but played five more after before the medical staff pulled him out of the lineup.
The Canucks were 0-5-2 in Lazar’s first seven games. And although the forward contributed one goal from the fourth line and Vancouver had a 4-1 advantage with him on the ice at five-on-five, the penalty-killing cratered and Lazar’s possession numbers were buffered only by the highest on-ice save percentage on the team.
But Lazar said that only made it harder to leave the lineup.
“I pride myself on playing through stuff,” he said. “I probably would have played through this unless the doctors told me not to.
“You're new to the team, and the role that I play, especially early in the year, it's a chance to kind of set that tone and find your identity and start building that culture from within, like: This is how we're going to play. I take a lot of pride in that, so sitting was tough. Especially, going through that losing streak to start, I don't want to be a guy that when things get tough, I'm out. I want to be there. I want to be part of the solution and just kind of dig in and work through it. I mean, that's just life. So I was very anxious to get back in and get that opportunity. I want to show that I do have a role on this team; I can mean a lot to it. And I think the first game back was a good step.”
Lazar played right wing on the fourth line with Dakota Joshua and centre Nils Aman, whose emergence as an everyday checking centre as a lean, 22-year-old rookie from Sweden has been one of the few positive stories in the Canucks’ first quarter.
The trio had a solid game. Joshua contributed four hits, Aman won five of nine faceoffs, the line spent several shifts in the offensive zone and did not get scored against.
“At the start of the second, we were being held in our zone a bit,” coach Bruce Boudreau said. “And Curtis talked to those guys -- 'we need a big shift' -- and he went out and had a big hit and it sort of turned things around for the second period. And that's the kind of the things they do.
“When somebody like him comes back in the lineup, you put him in because... he knows not only his role, but he knows what it takes to win. And he goes out and he does it. And you just hope that if there's anybody not on that train, he brings them along with him.”
Lazar knew what he was getting into in the market when he jumped at the chance to come home. The Canucks have spent their first 18 games (6-9-3) in crisis or near it. There is constant conjecture about Boudreau’s future, some of it fueled by hockey operations president Jim Rutherford’s criticism of the Canucks’ structure and culture.
“I'm enough of a veteran now where I've kind of seen a few things and you kind of get the hang of it,” Lazar said. “As players, you can't really look too far into it. If we do our job, nothing else matters. Teams always talk about keeping things internal; that's very important. But you string a few wins together and all of a sudden that outside noise is a little less.”
The Canucks practised Sunday with the same forward lines and defence pairings that played Friday.
Vasily Podkolzin, scratched against the Kings, could replace Nils Hoglander on a line with Sheldon Dries and Brock Boeser. But it appears Kyle Burroughs will again be an extra defenceman against Vegas.
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