Travis Green was a bit too cocky with the lack of timeout and goalie pull and it cost the team. He’ll probably learn from this and call timeouts and pull Markstrom quicker but even Vigneault couldn’t stop us from getting blown out by Boston with what I’m told was the best Canucks roster ever and Vigneault was a top shelf coach. Sometimes these games happen, in the real world you have some days where everything seems to go wrong. We tend to overrate the importance of these games - it’s the same thing as a 2-1 loss in the grand scheme of things. Fact: the Canucks played half of a good road game before I went to the bathroom and came back and the game was over.
The NHL isn’t some league where you can get lucky and win enough to be a playoff team. You have to put the work in and when players do that good things happen and you give yourself a good chance to win if you outwork your opponent. The Canucks have not been out worked very often this year. In the NHL that’s not easy to achieve as a coach with such a young team. Travis Green is very good at managing his players effort levels.
When it comes to managing skill levels.. we can out skill or be even with most teams in the league. But Beagle isn’t going to out skill Alex Ovechkin and probably won’t outwork him either because Ovi is a beast. That shouldn’t be happening. I remember Vigneault being very diligent about getting Kessler out there against top lines at all times. Then again Green doesn’t have a Ryan Kesler type forward because they rarely exist and if they do they’re not available. But still, Green has the option to call out a line change when he sees Ovechkin jump across the boards and he chooses not to. Probably does it to motivate his 4th liners and send them the message that he has confidence in them. That’s also fair enough in the regular season but if I see this in the playoffs I want him gone.