Post-Game Talk: WCSF GM7 | Canucks lose to Oilers | 2-3 (Garland & Hronek) | Season Over

[Caboose]

What a weird feeling.

Telling me we got to game 7 of the second round going into this season I would have been ecstatic. What a major accomplishment and overachieve based on expectations.

Yet, I feel so disappointed, I have no idea how we made it this far with no production from Pete and Norris Hughes barely playing at a top 15 or top 20 dman level. I never thought it would be possible to make it this deep without those 2.

It leaves you just wanting so much more and asking just what could have been possible if Petey and Hughes played to their potential. Did we have the depth and structure to actually make a run for the cup? Especially with Vezina Demko coming back?

 

[David Bruce Banner]

Considering I had the team battling for a playoff spot, and even though we lost to the f***ing Oilers, I can't look at this season as anything less than a success.
If we're going to maintain or even improve, Allvin's got his work cut out for him in the off season.

 

[olafsson]

On one hand, this season was a massive success. Making it to game 7 of the second round was huge for this team, a feat nobody saw coming. On the other hand, having Hughes and Pete completely disappear when the going got tough and we needed them the most, was tough to handle. The 2 no show games back to back in games 6 and 7 were also very heartbreaking to watch as a fan. The series is on the line twice and they come out with those embarrassing efforts? Someone needs to answer for that.

 

[Sedinery]

Joshua can hit but he was horrible in puck battles. The entire forward core other than Garland and Hogs lost puck battles

It is a game of possession and we lost it

 

[jd22]

what a season when everyone doubted the canucks from the beginning. september training camp the boys got to work early. hughes boeser miller the leaders. tocheet built a foundation for them to work on which was defense. limiting the amount of "high danger scoring chances". forechecking hard. pk was good. pp was good for the first half of the season but failed after the all star break. i said from before the playoffs started or with a couple of games left in the regular season, it was gonna be their downfall between winning and losing a playoff series. LONG and behold i was right. all the shots they kept passing around the perimeter, nobody crashing the net. nashville blocked tons of shots in the first series. oilers did the same and played agressively on the PK. tocheet should not run the PP next year. they need to find a new PP coach to fix it. lots of ufas 7-9 players. lindholm/cole/blueger/lafftery among others. gonna be a different team next year for sure but its gonna be hard for alvin and jr to make it work. oels penalty caphit for the next 6 years. hronek should be traded he was dogshit in the playoffs. never unleashed his powerful slapper until tonight. im guessing an arm/elbow/ribs/ankle that limited his shooting. hughes obviously playing hurt wouldnt be surprised if its ankle/torn labrum that limited his offensive numbers in the series. bouchard outplayed him and scored most of the goals for edmonton. this was a learning experience for everyone in the playoffs come back next year hungrier and stronger. this team still needs Two top 6 forwards with Finish. but they gotta find a way to make it work. anyways great season enjoy your summer everyone! go canucks go. i wont be watching the playoffs anymore now that my team is out. dont really care who wins the cup probably be dallas/florida or nyr. but would be nice for edmonton to take it and break that canadian 32 year cup drought" so we dont have to hear it for the next 5-10 years OH canada hasnt won a cup because theres more american teams. and bettmans in charge. anyways GOODNIGHT!

Paragraphs are your friend. Nobody wants to read an unorganized, uncapitalized, misspelled block of text.

 

[Sedinery]

...Boeser?

My bad def Boeser

Play to win for 60 minutes

Don’t play to not lose, it NEVER works

Come on Tocchet, your coaching philosophy is throttling

 

[Sedinery]

I don’t like the flag thing before the games. Do it once, we get it but to somehow make it a new tradition? Its dumb. Probably pisses off the refs and are we saying we give up before the gams starts?

Idiot marketing idea.

 

[F86puck]

I know there are doubters, but I have to wonder if Kessel would have helped when it comes to these kinds of games/series. A vet who has been there before and won. I was glad he was not signed when he tried out, but if I had known Hughes and Pete would be no-shows in crunch time, I would have reconsidered. Laugh all you want, but would he have been worse than them? And he certainly would have been cheaper, gladly taking league minimum. The word intangibles is overused, but maybe here it would have helped.

 

[BenningHurtsMySoul]

Uggggggghhghghgh that last block by Zadorov. Puck looked like it was going in, Skinner had no idea where it was.

Joshua can hit but he was horrible in puck battles. The entire forward core other than Garland and Hogs lost puck battles

It is a game of possession and we lost it

They'll let him walk. Fun story but he went long stretches being in effective and took dumb penalties.

 

[David Bruce Banner]

Also, @orcatown ... I missed reading your synopsises synopsiss synopsii recaps of the last few games.

 

[StickShift]

Waking up this morning and reading some of the quotes from the players—I definitely get the sense that they knew they were out of gas. The focus already was on next year rather than what they felt like lost. They seemed to appreciate what this year meant for the organization and the locker room.

This team over performed in a lot of areas in the regular season—but the story of the playoffs was the success this team had despite relatively quiet post-seasons from Pettersson and Hughes. I am very interested to see how the off-season goes as I think there are major/obvious areas to upgrade. It will be nice if Vancouver is perceived as a destination again.

 

[PuckMunchkin]

I don’t like the flag thing before the games. Do it once, we get it but to somehow make it a new tradition? Its dumb. Probably pisses off the refs and are we saying we give up before the gams starts?

Idiot marketing idea.

You do know the towels being waved by fans are because of the stick + towel incident that is being referenced?

 

[DFAC]

Is anyone going to talk about the stupid tripping penalty Lafferty takes 200 ft from his net that led to the GWG?

 

[mathonwy]

Hughes and pettersson era wont do shit.

Not counting this season you mean?

Like they won't do shit going forward?

 

[MikeK]

Hughes and pettersson era wont do shit.

Too early to say this.

But Pettersson was a major let down these playoffs. Some thought he had a cpl of good games, but I thought he was poor all playoffs. At no time was he dangerous. He definitely needs to bulk up and become a man because his boyish frame was being bounced around. He often looked like a boy playing against men. If we're here again a year from now and he's still a ghost he may very well be our version of Mitch Marner.

Hughes looked great in round one but clearly ran out of gas in round 2. He was playing like a guy who lacked oxygen. Made a lot of the most basic plays look difficult. He also needs to up his intensity in the playoffs. Often times he looked way to casual out there and ate important minutes off of PP time getting the puck up the ice. His casualness also allowed opponents to close the gap on him. He turned the puck over more in the playoffs than I saw from him all season.

Again, too early to write these guys off. This was their first real test of playoff hockey. You can have people tell you what to expect but it's something you really have to go through and experience for yourself to really grasp it. Now they know what to expect.

 

[Intangibos]

You know going into the playoffs I think we all had big concerns about our top 6. We have a great top 3 with Pettersson/Miller/Boeser, but no real second line to speak of. We tried to make Pettersson play as a one-man second line and it just didn't work.

Looking back, I hated the Kuzmenko trade at the time (not the Lindholm acquisition, but the "cap dump" of Kuzmenko) and in retrospect I think it looks much worse now. I saw a lot of posts here after the trade about it being a clear cap dump and "addition by subtraction", but I just don't see it. I heard a lot about how Tocchet didn't "trust" him, but he sure trusted Mikheyev with no goals in like 50 games to be stapled to Pettersson's wing. Unless Mikheyev is the best defensive winger in the league, or Kuzmenko is literally the worst defensive winger in the league, I think it was unbelievably foolish to dump Kuzmenko. Straight up Pejorative Slured. It created a massive gap in our forward lineup that was never filled.

We'll see if Kuzmeko has a poor season next year, but in Calgary he scored at a 40 goal/70 point pace over his 30 games there. We really missed his scoring and the lack of 2nd line wingers on this team was exposed to the point that we could barely muster 20 shots against a team with Nurse/Ceci playing in front of Skinner. Yikes.

 

[Mr. Canucklehead]

Honestly I’m not one bit upset. So many great things came of this season. I think the new generation of fans is enthusiastic maybe as ever.

@MS @Mr. Canucklehead @ChilliBilly

Any of you folks get a 91-92 vibe or a 19-20 one and does that or how much of that depends on the summer?

I might need a bit more time and distance to really answer that - I don't think this team is as strong as that 91-92 team was, and I don't think we're as bad or as cap-strapped as the 19-20 group was. I do think Games 5 and 6 gave me flashbacks to Travis Green coached hockey (not in a good way at all), and we do have some key pieces heading for free agency again, but I think we have significantly better braintrust now in Rutherford and Allvin heading into this offseason than we did with Jim pissing away a bunch of good players for nothing.

We've got some good pieces here moving forward. In particular, we have some real key pieces who you hope this was a major learning experience for, Pettersson in particular. I don't know what the deal with him was this off-season, but that was one of the roughest playoff performances relative to expectations for a star player we've seen in this city. I've heard Hughes lumped in with him a few times and couldn't disagree more - I would have liked to see more offensive magic and the "jitterbug" out of Hughes, but defensively, everything ran through him and he was a monster at chewing through 5v5 shifts. Hronek was the defender that struggled mightily, and especially given his reported contract demands, that makes you wonder. But back to Petey - hopefully he learns and grows from this. Hopefully guys like a healthy Demko and a healthy Boeser can make a difference, but it also highlights what a crapshoot the playoffs are - you need injury luck, and the Canucks got boned on that front this year. Full marks to Arturs Silovs for stepping in and filling the net better than anyone could have hoped, and for being our best player in Game 7.

Anyway - a curious off-season ahead. We have a number of guys who we have to make decisions on that played pretty big roles in this run - Lindholm, Zadorov, Joshua - and some other key veterans in Myers and Cole who the club may or may not want to bring back as well. Interested to see what Chef Allvin and Trader Jim have in store.

 

[ManVanFan]

You know going into the playoffs I think we all had big concerns about our top 6. We have a great top 3 with Pettersson/Miller/Boeser, but no real second line to speak of. We tried to make Pettersson play as a one-man second line and it just didn't work.

Looking back, I hated the Kuzmenko trade at the time (not the Lindholm acquisition, but the "cap dump" of Kuzmenko) and in retrospect I think it looks much worse now. I saw a lot of posts here after the trade about it being a clear cap dump and "addition by subtraction", but I just don't see it. I heard a lot about how Tocchet didn't "trust" him, but he sure trusted Mikheyev with no goals in like 50 games to be stapled to Pettersson's wing. Unless Mikheyev is the best defensive winger in the league, or Kuzmenko is literally the worst defensive winger in the league, I think it was unbelievably foolish to dump Kuzmenko. Straight up Pejorative Slured. It created a massive gap in our forward lineup that was never filled.

We'll see if Kuzmeko has a poor season next year, but in Calgary he scored at a 40 goal/70 point pace over his 30 games there. We really missed his scoring and the lack of 2nd line wingers on this team was exposed to the point that we could barely muster 20 shots against a team with Nurse/Ceci playing in front of Skinner. Yikes.

Some coaches refuse to take the good with the bad. They needed scoring in the end. Kuzmenko probably scores 30 next season.

 

[Bankerguy]

have any injuries come out? Petey sprained wrist? Huggy two broken ribs? etc.

 

[Mr. Canucklehead]

have any injuries come out? Petey sprained wrist? Huggy two broken ribs? etc.

Not as of yet - I imagine we might hear a bit on locker clean out day/year end press conferences.

 

[ManVanFan]

Canucks averaged 20.8! shots per game in these playoffs. That's the lowest in the past 20 years.

Somehow Allvin turned the 2nd highest offensive team scoring at the all-star break into one of the worst offensive teams.

 

[Just A Bit Outside]

Have to wonder if we will ever see a fully healthy Demko for a whole season.

Bubble proved what he can do when he is.

But the injury history has to be a major concern for mgmt.

Everyone knew he would have been the X factor but unfortunately, I don’t think we will ever see him at 100%.

 

[Hit the post]

What a weird feeling.

Telling me we got to game 7 of the second round going into this season I would have been ecstatic. What a major accomplishment and overachieve based on expectations.

Yet, I feel so disappointed, I have no idea how we made it this far with no production from Pete and Norris Hughes barely playing at a top 15 or top 20 dman level. I never thought it would be possible to make it this deep without those 2.

It leaves you just wanting so much more and asking just what could have been possible if Petey and Hughes played to their potential. Did we have the depth and structure to actually make a run for the cup? Especially with Vezina Demko coming back?

Hughes has to play defense as well unlike Selke Pete. Was Pete's play even in the top 100 forwards this post-season (forget top 15 or top 20 level)?

But I'll say again, I'll give Elias a 'pass' based on his past performance/career as a Canuck. That buys you a 'mulligan' in my books (just my opinion).

Next season, Elias will over 11 million cap hit (difference in cap hits between him & Hughes would make re-signing the Big Russian a slam dunk). He's got his work cut out for him with that on his shoulders.

 

[ManVanFan]

Have to wonder if we will ever see a fully healthy Demko for a whole season.

Bubble proved what he can do when he is.

But the injury history has to be a major concern for mgmt.

Everyone knew he would have been the X factor but unfortunately, I don’t think we will ever see him at 100%.

Trade him. Clearly Silovs playing below league average will win many games. I don't understand why DeSmith wasn't put back in either. In his 2 games he had a .911 save percent 2.02 goals against. Silovs was sporting a .898 and 2.91

 

[PuckMunchkin]

Hughes has to play defense as well unlike Selke Pete. Was Pete's play even in the top 100 forwards this post-season (forget top 15 or top 20 level)?

But I'll say again, I'll give Elias a 'pass' based on his past performance/career as a Canuck. That buys you a 'mulligan' in my books (just my opinion).

Next season, Elias will over 11 million cap hit (difference in cap hits between him & Hughes would make re-signing the Big Russian a slam dunk). He's got his work cut out for him with that on his shoulders.

Im just curious with these posts that sound like ultimatums.

What happens if he does not meet your criteria next year? What are you threatening to do?