The banged-up Vancouver Canucks headed on the road and clawed their way to a 4-3 shootout win against the St. Louis Blues. Was it the prettiest win? Absolutely not. But it was an important victory nonetheless, as the team showed some pretty serious resilience to outlast their opposition, especially against a pretty intense 3rd period surge. Ideally, their injury luck gets a little bit better than how it’s been going, but the Canucks are winning in spite of this and that should be admired.

Here’s the win, by the numbers.

As always, you can find our glossary guide of advanced stats here.

Game Flow

For the first two periods, this game very much hung in the balance. Neither the Canucks nor the Blues could really separate themselves from each other in the Corsi department or expected goals, reflected not only on the scoresheet but also in the game flow chart above. That balance was broken in the third, especially in the last couple of minutes, where the Canucks probably started to run out of gas, being down Brock Boeser since early in the contest. The Blues racked up a 74.16 xGF% share with a 6-1 edge in high-danger chances in that final frame, but fortunately Vancouver was able to hold strong to send this game into extras.

Heat Map

The heat map isn’t anything tremendously impressive from either team. Overall, there weren’t a lot of scoring chances to speak of at 5v5 play, with the Blues holding a narrow 20-18 edge on that front. In terms of high-danger chances, St. Louis owned a 10-7 lead. But as shown on the heat map, that difference didn’t really add a whole lot to their hot spot in relation to the Canucks. A low-key game isn’t the worst thing in the entire world, given the kind of personnel that Vancouver has been forced to call up and ice.

Individual Advanced Stats

Corsi Champ: Pierre-Olivier Joseph being forced into regular minutes this early into the season is not ideal, but the defenceman has been stepping up to hold down the fort. He led the team last night with a 70.37 CF% while being thrown out against a good chunk of the Blues’ middle 6. It was some solid work especially being thrust up into a bigger role in the lineup, playing against better opposition than he’s probably used to.

Corsi Chump: Mackenzie MacEachren’s Canuck debut wasn’t something to write home about. His 27.78 CF% brought up the rear of the pack, on ice for a 2-7 hole in shots and a second-worst 23.08 xGF%. MacEachren did get slightly sewered by his deployment, with zero of his shifts or faceoff starts coming in the offensive zone. Again, considering the kind of player and situation that he’s being played in, the context makes these numbers slightly more forgiveable.

xGF:  PO Joseph led the Canucks in this category too, tallying up a 68.12 xGF% and holding a solid 9-3 scoring chance edge and 3-1 high-danger chance advantage as well. Again, it wasn’t anything spectacular, but for a 7th-defenceman asked to play regularly in the lineup, the results are anything but the worst. Of course, the main attraction was Kiefer Sherwood last night, the hat-trick hero naturally getting the Canucks’ best raw xGF at 0.69. The winger also held a 3-1 high-danger chance lead himself, with just more xGA coming from playing against stronger opposition.

GSAx:  Kevin Lankinen did enough to get the Canucks across the finish line in this one. With the Blues racking up 3.64 xGF across the entire game in all situations, the Finn put in a bounce-back performance to post a 0.64 GSAx. The three goals that got past him were evenly distributed through high, middle, and low danger, which isn’t the worst thing in the entire world. It was nice to see Lankinen finish in the positives as well, given how his last two starts went.

Statistical Musings

Working his way up:  Tom Willander’s second game in the NHL went pretty darn solid. The young Swede saw himself elevated to second-pairing minutes, playing the third most amount of minutes amongst all defencemen and recording some pretty darn good stats. While his 40.00 CF% was -10.00 CF% rel to team average, Willander kept things tidy in his own end, a 43.95 xGF% giving him a slight 4.15 xGF% rel to team average. Essentially, the rookie held his own, performing just above team average when it came to expected goals share at both ends of the ice. Willander nearly split high-danger chances too, sitting at 3-4 from last night. Not bad for being put into the position that he has been.

Eventually for Evander?:  Much has been made of Evander Kane’s lack of production thus far into the season, which is absolutely fair. For how much he is making, the winger has been underperforming in terms of points scored. That being said, last night he did do plenty of good things, posting the team’s second-best CF% at 68.18 and the 4th-best xGF% at 55.16. Something has got to break eventually, and with how depleted this lineup is, hopefully it’s soon that Kane starts producing.

As a team

CF% – 42.86% HDCF% – 38.89% xGF% – 38.62%

The Canucks weren’t the greatest offensively besides Kiefer Sherwood, but they were decent enough defensively to keep the Blues at bay. That was all they really needed last night fortunately, and they were able to ride out a late surge from the Blues to push this into overtime. Then, that was all that Lankinen needed to secure the result in a shootout. With the state of this lineup, the win was definitely a welcome sight and showed the depths of resilience and character on this roster.

Vancouver travels slightly north, taking on the Minnesota Wild tomorrow night.

Stats provided by naturalstattrick.com