Canucks, Red Wings moving in opposite directions

What was old in Detroit is new again.

Beautiful Art Deco towers, once abandoned, are occupied with businesses and residents. The downtown has been refurbished and re-inhabited, and there is a distinct energy and excitement about the renewal. A long-dormant city has come back to life.

It’s a perfect place for 37-year-old Patrick Kane to revitalize and extend his career, and help lead the Detroit Red Wings back towards the National Hockey League playoffs after one of the game’s oldest and proudest franchises missed the Stanley Cup tournament the last nine years amid a dubious, seemingly endless rebuild.

Kane’s pair of goals on Thursday against the Vancouver Canucks, capped by an empty-netter in Detroit’s 5-1 win, made him just the fifth American to score 500 goals in the NHL. It also made the Red Wings 13-4-3 since Nov. 28.

On a rebuild of their own that they hope will take far less than nine years, the Canucks are moving the other way in the NHL standings.

After a season-high, four-game winning streak just before Christmas gave the team hope for saving its season, the Canucks have lost seven of eight games since then, including five in a row.

There was an inescapable reality on display here Thursday night. There is only so much the Canucks can do while missing three NHL centres due to injury and filling the bottom third of their lineup with first- and second-year prospects.

Unless their goalie steals them a game, the Canucks need to play something close to error-free hockey. Or at least, they can’t continue to make big mistakes like they made against the Red Wings.

Vancouver played well in the first period and wasn’t rewarded. And then the Canucks were careless defensively in the second and got crushed. 

“I thought we had some good moments, especially in the first,” Vancouver defenceman Tyler Myers told reporters. “But our details just aren’t good enough. We’re giving, odd-man after odd-man rush… and it seems to be, you know, consistent in the last stretch here. It’s not because we’re not talking about it or going over it or working on it. It comes down to the guys here in the room. We’ve got to be much better with our details because it just accumulates, it just trickles down the line with our team game. 

“We have to be much better. You know, if we didn’t have the two goalies that we have, the score would be way worse.”

Goalie Kevin Lankinen stopped several two-on-ones, but looked at fault on Kane’s power-play goal that made it 1-0 with 29 seconds remaining in the first period, deep in his net and too far off his near post as the future Hall-of-Famer exploited that opening.

The Canucks were two players short after David Kampf, having failed on what should have been a clearance, took a tripping penalty 19 seconds after Buium’s high stick at 17:47.

“You get to five-on-three and give up a goal, and I think that kind of took our momentum (away) a little to finish the period there,” winger Brock Boeser said. “But I think then that’s part of kind of maturing. Coming into the second period, we have to kind of learn to regroup and bring that same tenacity as how we started the game.”

The Canucks didn’t.

They managed only four shots in the middle period, gave up a handful of outnumbered rushes and simply botched five-on-five coverage on Detroit goals by Axel Sandin-Pellikka at 5:09 and J.T. Compher at 10:10.

After Elias Pettersson turned over the puck during what had been a strong shift for the Canucks, the Red Wings countered three-on-two. Vancouvers survived the rush. But on his backcheck, Canuck left winger Evander Kane strayed needlessly to the far side of the ice, leaving Sandin-Pellika open as the trailer to beat Lankinen top corner.

On Compher’s goal, which came three minutes after DeBrusk scored from Kiefer Sherwood’s pass on a Vancouver power play, defenceman Myers shadowed his check to the blueline, where the Canucks again doubled up on the wrong Red Wing, leading to another series of mistakes and open space in front of Lankinen that Detroit exposed.

The Canucks have yielded 40 goals in the last nine games, and look at times tentative and second-guessing where they should be while defending.

“Yeah, of course, the puck goes in your net a lot, you don’t play the same way,” DeBrusk concurred. “It’s just human nature; you don’t want to get scored on. Yeah, I think that has something to do with some of our breakouts and plays and things we’ve been getting caught (on). Sometimes it makes you play on your heels. And, you know, when you play on your heels in this league, bad things happen.”

“There’s going to be breakdowns at different times of the game,” Myers said. “It’s the same conversation all the time: Where does it start? Does it start with your breakouts, with your forecheck? If we spend more time doing the right things, getting pucks behind guys, getting on our forecheck more, it means we’re defending less. It means those breakdowns happen less. And then at the same time, you know, you can look at them and figure out… a way to be better and more consistent with your D-zone. Everything’s connected. You’ve just got to come in and try and figure it out every day and make little tweaks here and there. Just get better.” 

The Canucks haven’t scored more than three times in a game since Dec. 20, and everything that happened after they fell behind 3-1 felt inconsequential – except of course for Kane scoring into an open net after Vancouver coach Adam Foote pulled Lankinen with 5:08 remaining in the two-goal game and defenceman Zeev Buium, one of two 20-year-old rookies on the Vancouver blue line, fanned on his pass after having time and space to make one.

The Red Wings streamed off their bench to mob Kane, looking like a team on its way to something.

“I was super young and we always watched his highlights,” Boeser, who is also American, said of Kane. “It’s obviously not fun to be out there when he scores his 500^th, but it’s a supercool accomplishment. I love seeing how well he’s doing at his age. It just shows you that he’s probably one of the best, if not the best, American player to ever play the game.”

Pointless through the first third of their season-long six-game road trip, the Canucks will rest Friday before visiting the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday, beginning a stretch of three games in four nights.