Columnist image

| Archive

VANCOUVER – Travis Green has his healthy bodies back. The question now is whether the Vancouver Canucks rookie head coach can get his hockey team back. The recent returns to the lineup of injured forwards Sven Baertschi, Brandon Sutter and most-importantly Bo Horvat are certainly huge steps in the right direction. But even with all three players in uniform together for the first time since Nov. 24 on Sunday night, the Canucks not only lost to the high-flying Winnipeg Jets, but couldn’t muster a single goal in a 1-0 defeat.

Green’s greatest challenge now is somehow recapturing the positive energy – and the surprising results – his team enjoyed in the first two months of the season. It wasn’t just that the Canucks charged from the gates with six wins and a shootout loss in their first 10 games and occupied a perch well-above the playoff bar at 11-8-3 through the first quarter of the season. Far beyond the outcomes and the position in the standings though, was the way the Canucks were achieving their results.

They weren’t just a feel-good story to those on the outside. There was a genuinely good-feeling within the locker room that was helping to produce results on a nearly nightly basis. Brock Boeser was emerging as a legitimate scoring threat, Derek Dorsett was shocking himself and the hockey world with regular production, Jake Virtanen was more than holding his own on a line with Daniel and Henrik Sedin, Anders Nilsson was pitching shutouts and looking like he may never allow another goal and Derrick Pouliot was settling in as a solid addition to a defence corps trying to get younger and more productive under a coach who was encouraging his blueliners to get up into the play as much as possible. Oh, those were the days. The storylines were endless and it seemed there was a different hero every time out.

For the first couple of months, there was a spirit about the Canucks that hadn’t been present now for a couple of seasons. After just four wins in 19 games following Sunday’s shutout loss, however, Green somehow has to figure out a way to re-energize a group that has fallen out of the post-season picture and is yet again playing out the string before the end of January. He has all of the component parts – save for Dorsett – healthy and available to him, but so much has changed in just six weeks.

“That’s a good question,” Green admits, when asked how he plans to go about propping up his sagging troops. “You push your team to play its best every night. This is not going to be all of a sudden you get your players back and ‘hey, we’re back.’ Just because we were in a playoff spot then and winning some games, it’s a long season. We were playing some good hockey, but it doesn’t just magically happen.”

The Canucks didn’t play poorly against a Winnipeg team with legitimate designs on producing a Stanley Cup for the prairies. But it’s nearly impossible to win without a goal, and despite a full-roster of healthy forwards, the Canucks are back to a place where they have been for too long now: unable to produce offence. They have been blanked twice in their past eight games and since the start of the new year, their 15 goals in eight games puts them ahead of only Columbus in terms of offensive output among the 31 teams in the league.

Boeser, who was so hot in December, scoring eight goals over a 10 game stretch, has now gone ice cold going six games without a goal and with just one in his past nine outings. But he’s far from alone. Daniel Sedin has three goals in January and Brandon Sutter has a pair. Other than that, though, no Canucks forward – and it’s a long list – has more than a single goal over the past nine games. Henrik Sedin has not scored since Nov. 14 – a string of 29 games. Markus Granlund has now gone 13 games without scoring. Thomas Vanek, Sam Gagner, Sven Baertschi and Loui Eriksson all play significant minutes and see power play time and haven’t looked dangerous for a while now. Eriksson has one goal in his past 19 game, Baertschi has one in 15 (a stretch interrupted by his jaw injury), while Vanek and Gagner have each scored once in the past nine.

The Canucks aren’t good enough defensively to win many games when they struggle most nights to put two goals on the board. As a result, it’s not hard to figure out why this team isn’t winning many hockey games these days. They have fallen behind in four straight and five of their last six. And once they spot an opponent a lead, they start chasing the game which usually backfires on the Canucks and leads to high-risk gambles and defensive lapses in an effort to generate offence which rarely arrives.

Now, with a full complement of healthy bodies to work with, Green should be able to ice a lineup with the various pieces in their proper places and the hope is that structure gives the Canucks a chance to compete.

But it’s going to take some of the best coaching of Green’s life to motivate his team which is now 13 points out of a playoff spot with 35 games still remaining on the schedule.

“You have to play well, you have to play hard and you’ve got to compete,” Green says of the message he’ll try to impart on his team. “Your systems have to be good, you have to be committed from top to bottom and that doesn’t change for me no matter who is playing.”

The names and faces will look familiar to Canucks fans now that Horvat, Baertschi and Sutter are back from injury. But the team they see on the ice hardly resembles the one that came firing out of the gates this season producing terrific results and even better storylines. It’s up to Green to get through to his group and get them playing at the same high level they did in the first two months of the season.

They had a good thing going for a while. Green somehow has to find a way to get it back.