After suffering an embarrassing 5-0 loss to the Seattle Kraken on home ice on Wednesday night, the Vancouver Canucks can officially say their season is over.
With seven games remaining in the 2024-25 regular season, the Canucks trail the No. 2 Western Conference wildcard Minnesota Wild by eight points with just one game in hand.
They can forget about catching the St. Louis Blues, who have won 11 straight to catapult themselves into the top Western Conference wildcard spot at 91 points. They will not be catching the Colorado Avalanche, who are in third place in the Central Division at 98 points, but this has been a wildly impressive run of games to put the Canucks to shame nonetheless.
Already a poor offensive team, the Canucks cannot drum up a worse performance than what they produced against the Kraken.
No goals on three power play opportunities and fewer than 30 shots on goal against one of the worst defensive teams in the NHL, but maybe the Canucks are who they are at this point.
Of course, the Canucks were without Elias Pettersson and Nils Hoglander once again, and Filip Chytil's season appears to be over after another concussion. This is the road the Canucks chose when they sold low on J.T. Miller in January and traded away a solid but underperforming veteran in Carson Soucy for future assets.
Five different goal-scorers propelled the Kraken to a blowout victory over the Canucks, while the Canucks... failed to score a goal.
Producing offence down two centers is hard, to be clear, but what of the rest of the team? Quinn Hughes has been doing it all season, but players like Conor Garland, Jake DeBrusk, and Brock Boeser are all capable scorers.
Garland, Teddy Blueger, and Nils Aman all failed to record shots on goal against the Kraken. Garland had been staring down a career year only weeks ago, and now he looks like he would be lucky to match his career-high 47 points with three to go and only seven games left.
And that's just a microcosm of the 2024-25 Canucks season.