If watching Game 3 of the Vancouver Canucks-Nashville Predators series felt a lot like Game 2, but with the clubs reversing their roles, that would be a fairly accurate assessment. Vancouver was a highly frustrated home team in the previous contest but played the role of the annoying road team on Friday night in Nashville. Now head coach Rick Tocchet’s ensemble gets to enjoy its Saturday up 2-1 in the first-round series as opposed to worrying about how to avoid falling behind 3-1 with another game at Bridgestone Arena on Sunday. Here are the takeaways.
Canucks’ Version of Uno Reverse
We wrote extensively about how Game 2 played out. Rather than take the momentum from a bold Game 1 victory, the Canucks were flustered all night long by a dogged Predators side that never allowed anything to go the hosts’ way. It wasn’t a fun game unless one has a predilection for slow-burn, absentee offense hockey. For Game 3, Vancouver basically decided that whatever Nashville could do on its travels, so could they. A hockey Uno Reverse if you will, where one team makes its opponent suffer a comeuppance by using its own strategy against them.
After a loud welcome from the fans for the boys draped in yellow, the Canucks withstood decent pressure. The first minutes of the contest were spent almost exclusively in their own zone. But one thing stood out. The Predators weren’t actually creating many good scoring chances. The forechecking was solid, and they were passing the puck along the blue line and the boards, Vancouver struggled to perform line changes, etc., but nothing really happened.
In the pre-game studio show on Sportsnet, analyst Kevin Bieksa made a play on Nashville’s “Commit to the pain” mantra by explaining the usefulness of “commit to the lane.” He was talking about what the Predators did defensively in Game 2, but it might as well have been a Nostradamus-like act of predicting what Vancouver was about to do in Game 3. The Canucks were superb at blocking shots and minimizing great scoring opportunities by narrowing lanes for passes and shots. Vancouver defencemen repelled 28 attempts on the night, with Ian Cole sacrificing his body five times and Tyler Myers, Teddy Blueger, and Dakota Joshua three times each.
Offensively, the game was about cashing in on chances, not necessarily creating a bunch of them. After all, the Canucks tallied no more than 12 shots on goal. The playoff record for the fewest shots on target by the team that won is 10, done by the New Jersey Devils in 1990. But this was one of those games where survival mattered.
A Case of DeSmith
One of the big storylines heading into Game 2 was, understandably, starting goalie Thatcher Demko’s absence due to injury. Enter Casey DeSmith, a very capable netminder, someone who has played well this season but isn’t the guy. It would be harsh to blame him for the Game 2 defeat. Of the four goals Nashville scored, one was an empty netter and another benefitted from a beguilingly odd deflection. But DeSmith didn’t make the key stops when the game hung in the balance.
Not so in Game 3. Despite all the shot blocking performed by the players in front of him, DeSmith still had to shield his net from 30 attempts. He looked very confident, and while some of the rebounding is an element of his game that needs work, he came up big. Down 2-0 and sensing that the contest might escape them, Nashville poured it on in the third period, and he shined bright.
Whether or not the Canucks can make a deep postseason run with the player who is ostensibly the backup remains to be seen. At the time of writing, there is an aura of mystery surrounding Demko’s status. That said, if Game 3 is anything to go by, the Canucks know they can win big games with DeSmith in the net, even when they don’t play their best hockey.
Special Teams and Special Players
Lastly, a few words on how the Canucks performed on special teams. This match could have had a vastly different result were it not for the incredible penalty killing. Vancouver took five penalties in total, two of which led to a 5-on-3 for the Predators and some of which were relatively early in the game. A hostile environment, a hungry opponent, and going down a man is often a recipe for disaster, but Vancouver held strong. In some ways, that may have been what took some of the air out of the Nashville bubble.
On the other end of the special teams’ spectrum, for this first time in the series, Vancouver made good on what little Nashville gave them. The Predators only took six penalties in the first two games, but the Canucks were ice-cold on the power play. This too changed in Game 3. Brock Boeser and J.T. Miller, two supremely important players who had been mostly quiet in the first two matches, made all the difference on the man advantage on Friday. Even though fans await Elias Pettersson’s first goal of this postseason, he had an assist on Miller’s first-period marker. When times are tough, all forms of help count.
Overall, Nashville was the more disciplined squad (three penalties versus five), yet it was Vancouver that finished the night with 66% efficiency on the man advantage. That’s just the way it goes sometimes.
We have three matches in the books in this series. It’s difficult to imagine what comes next, save that there probably won’t be a lot of offense. There hasn’t been so far. But the key here for the Canucks is that they have more talented playmakers. If they clamp down on defense as they mostly have thus far and if DeSmith stands tall enough to make the team forget they don’t have their number one goalie, there may be some light at the end of the tunnel.
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