Vancouver Canucks sum up the season with 4-0 loss to Sabres
Well, the Vancouver Canucks summed up their 2017-18 season pretty well on Thursday night. One step forward, two steps back. A 4-0 shutout home loss to the Buffalo Sabres? Sounds about right.
48 hours ago, I wrote about how the Vancouver Canucks played their best game of the season when they defeated the Los Angeles Kings, 6-2. Now, I’m writing about how this team played its worst game of the season — and it was not even close.
Give the Buffalo Sabres credit. Not a lot of folks are viewing them as a threat to win any games these days, but they sure know how to play with pride. They swept the Western Canadian road trip, and the Canucks were arguably their easiest victims.
The Canucks may have registered 30 shots on goal, but they sure didn’t generate a whole lot of chances. And they did not play with any pride. How do you go from scoring six goals one night on a stingy Kings’ team to zero against the Sabres?
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We don’t really know that. The Canucks have a lot of roster weaknesses, but their inability to string together three or more games in a row of strong efforts is hard to understand.
Take away Brock Boeser‘s two goals against Los Angeles, and he hasn’t scored a goal in his last seven games. Then again, it’s not fair to put that much pressure on a rookie to do all of the scoring.
Loui Eriksson provided hope that he was going to get hot again by scoring three points in that game against the Kings. He was fairly quiet, registering just two shots in 15:13 of ice time.
Entering the All-Star break, the team’s 19-24-6 record is good enough for 28th in the NHL. On the bright side, they are getting closer to ensuring a top-five pick in a fairly strong 2018 Draft class.
But even if the Canucks were to land Rasmus Dahlin, he’s not single-handedly making this team more competitive every night. With losses like this to the Sabres, Vancouver is just showing how many flaws there are on the roster.
According to NHL.com, the Canucks now rank 26th in goals per game with 2.59. Their 3.18 goals against per game are sixth-last in the NHL. They’re also generating just 29.9 shots per contest, good (or bad enough), for 27th in the league. Long story short, that is not going to win you a lot of games.
This season is lost. The Canucks are simply just looking towards the end of the season. Perhaps Erik Gudbranson and/or Thomas Vanek trades will net some nice picks and prospects. Maybe the NHL Draft lottery lands them Dahlin.
Other than that, it’s hard to be positive about how the rest of the season will go. This team continues to take one step forward and two steps back. Not what you want from a team that’s rebuilding.