Canucks: 3 takeaways from disappointing 3-2 loss to Philadelphia

Don’t look now, but it might already be time to enter panic mode for the Vancouver Canucks.

The team continued their season-opening five-game road trip on Saturday, facing off against the Philadelphia Flyers for a matinee match-up at Wells Fargo Center.

It wasn’t exactly the best start to the 2022-23 campaign for the Canucks, who blew a three-goal lead to Connor McDavid and the Edmonton Oilers on Wednesday night.

Fortunately for Vancouver, they were set to play against a less offensively-loaded club in Philadelphia, who were already without key names like Sean Couturier, Cam Atkinson and Ryan Ellis.

You can probably see where we’re going with this.

The Canucks ended up putting together an even more disappointing performance than the one on Wednesday, once again allowing their opponent to crawl back into the game and to eventually come away with the two points.

With the loss, Vancouver now falls to 0-2-0 on the year. Although it is still early on, it’s also hard to look past some of the glaring issues that have presented themselves in the first six periods of the season.

Here are the three takeaways from Saturday’s 3-2 loss:

Special teams anything but special

Quite frankly, there’s no way to sugar coat this. The Canucks’ special teams need help, and they need help fast.

After putting up historically-low numbers on the penalty kill last year, while also sporting one of the more inconsistent powerplays in terms of unit production and chemistry, the team has picked up right where they left off in the first two games of the season.

The Canucks surrendered five powerplay opportunities to the Flyers on Saturday afternoon, bringing their total to a staggering 13 in just six periods of play.

Three of those powerplays, one of which was their second too-many-men infraction in as many games, took place in the opening frame when the Canucks were clearly the worse of the two teams on the ice.

Yes, it is hard to fault the Canucks for drawing the other two penalties in the second period, particularly the (stop us if you’ve heard this before) questionable high-sticking call against Nils Höglander.

But, at the end of the day, Vancouver wasn’t able to stop their opponent from capitalizing on their man advantage opportunities, resulting in their lead being cut down to one in the middle frame.

To make matters worse, the Canucks couldn’t even capitalize on their own powerplay opportunities, going 0-for-5 on the afternoon, including yet another shorthanded tally against (see below for more), as well as two failed powerplay attempts in the third period when the game was very much up for grabs.