EDMONTON — After making 42 saves Sunday to help the Vancouver Canucks take a 2-1 lead in their playoff series against the Edmonton Oilers, rookie goalie Arturs Silovs couldn’t keep up in his media scrum with the catalogue of stops he was being asked to explain.
The big save on Leon Draisaitl?
“Which one?” Silovs said, not meaning to be funny or cocky.
The second-period breakaway?
“Ah, breakaway,” he recalled, happy to have an answer. “I was just, like, waiting patiently for him to do the first move.”
The wild scramble at the end of that period when he stopped Vincent Desharnais’ point-blank shot, but had the puck trickle behind him before Quinn Hughes, Elias Pettersson and the rest of the Canucks’ roster piled into the crease behind him?
Blank look from Silovs. Somewhere a cricket chirped.
Not only does the 23-year-old minor-league callup not know what he doesn’t know, he isn’t even sure about what he has already done. Which in just six games, has been a massive amount for the Canucks.
When veteran backup Casey DeSmith was unable to play Game 4 of the first-round series against Nashville — three games after Vezina Trophy-candidate starter Thatcher Demko was injured — Silovs, with zero experience in the National Hockey League playoffs, merely went in and outplayed Predators’ goaltending star Juuse Saros.
Now three games into Round 2, he is outplaying Oilers starter Stuart Skinner so much that while Silovs was making 21 saves in the third period of Vancouver’s 4-3 win, Skinner was watching from the Edmonton bench after being yanked by coach Kris Knoblauch after surrendering four goals on 15 shots through 40 minutes.
Not only has Silovs not been the liability for the Canucks many predicted, based only on his inexperience and the daunting circumstances surrounding of his sudden rise to prominence, but the six-foot-four Latvian is outplaying celebrated opponents and actually giving Vancouver the advantage in the crease the team planned to have with Demko when the Stanley Cup tournament began.
“Great story,” Canuck winger Dakota Joshua said Sunday. “He keeps getting better every game. Very confident kid. He puts a lot of confidence in the rest of the group when he’s back there and, yeah, he’s just handled it like a true professional. He just goes about his business and does his thing.
“We knew that he’s a great goalie before he got the chance. But sure, it goes a long way when you see somebody step in and do that well and, like I said, just instilling confidence when he’s back there that if there are multiple breakdowns, he’s got our back.”
Despite the lopsided 45-18 shot count, the Canucks did not have multiple breakdowns on Sunday as the team, as it has all season, bounced back impressively from a late collapse in Game 2 that allowed the heavily-favoured Oilers to even the series on Friday.
The epic Oilers power play scored two more goals in Game 3, but those were offset by a pair of Canuck power-play goals from Elias Lindholm, whose second one at 17:35 of the second period made it 4-2 and caused Vancouver to spend another third period in its own zone.
But unlike their complete retreat in Game 2, the Canucks did not surrender the middle of the ice to the Oilers and, at five-on-five, played the Connor McDavid-Leon Draisaitl line about even as Knoblauch played his megastars mainly against the trio of Boeser, J.T. Miller and Pius Suter.
In nearly eight minutes of five-on-five ice time of Miller versus McDavid, shots were 5-4 for Vancouver and the only goal was scored by Boeser, who finished with two to match Lindholm.
“Well, that was their choice today; obviously, they got the second change,” Miller said of the matchup that crushed the Canucks on Friday, when both McDavid and Draisaitl registered four points in the Oilers’ 4-3 win and scoring chances were 18-1. “I thought we defended them harder. I think we just played harder against them today in the sense of less separation. We didn’t let them into the middle of the rink as much, and when you keep it to the outside it’s easier for us.”
“There’s no question that line dominated us in Game 2 at home.” Boeser said. “We looked at some video and we talked about some things that we’d like to do better, and I thought we played against them better tonight. Obviously, that line. . . probably two of the best players in the world, and it’s a challenge. We knew they were going to push back. I think just sticking to our structure and believing in our system helps us get the job done.”
The Canucks blocked 25 shots, 18 of them by defencemen as all six Vancouver blue-liners got in front of at least two shots.
But the story, again, was Silovs, who after appearing in nine NHL games during his first four seasons in the Canucks organization, is now 4-2-0 in the playoffs with a .908 save rate and knockdowns against Saros and Skinner.
“I just, like, feel confident,” Silovs said. “Like, guys got my back (from) Game 1. I had to have them today. Everyone was resilient, like, blocking shots. Our guys managed to block a lot of them.”
Silovs is managing to stay in the moment instead of looking at the big picture, which is excellent for the Canucks in case he is awed by the scale of the canvas and realizes he’s not supposed to be doing what he’s doing.
“I don’t really think about it,” he said. “Like, it’s so nice to play in a hostile place. . . especially winning away games (that) are so important. It’s just fun to win these kind of games.
“I’m not really nervous now. I’m just, like, trusting what I’m doing, having full confidence. Now, it’s like getting more comfortable.”
“You know, he’s a quiet guy,” Boeser said. “So I haven’t gotten to know him that much. But I mean, just seeing him around the rink and in practices and the games, he competes hard. I’m sure he has that inner belief in himself, and I know we have the belief in him as a team. When he’s making some of those saves back there, it fuels our group.”
It gives them an advantage no one expected.