VANCOUVER — Things were so bad for the Vancouver Canucks in the third period Saturday that even goalie Kevin Lankinen was lousy.
Lankinen has been a life raft for the Canucks this season with starter Thatcher Demko out indefinitely due to a knee injury and rookie Arturs Silovs struggling badly. Kevin Lankinen would be the team MVP through 12 games — if the team didn’t also include otherworldly defenceman Quinn Hughes.
And Hughes was ineffective on Saturday, too.
Neither he nor Lankinen was able to save the Canucks from themselves in a 7-3 loss to the Edmonton Oilers, who skated largely unopposed in the third period and pumped in four goals in five minutes to expose Vancouver’s deficiencies.
Shots in the final period were 16-6 — 16-4 until a late Vancouver power play provided a Pius Suter garbage goal irrelevant to everyone except Edmonton netminder Stuart Skinner.
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It was a startling display for the Canucks, who just swept a three-game California road trip and produced their best form this season in wins against the Anaheim Ducks and Los Angeles Kings.
But we’re seeing a trend.
The Canucks have won six straight road games. They have won one of six games at Rogers Arena, and on Saturday were embarrassed on home ice for the second straight event.
The New Jersey Devils humiliated Vancouver 6-0 at the end of its last homestand. Saturday was the start of another one, and with five home games left before they travel again, the Canucks need to locate their inner road warriors. Or at least the fast, smart, direct game they have been playing away from home.
They were just too easy to play against when Saturday’s game was on the line.
“I think we’re still growing as a team,” defenceman Carson Soucy said. “Obviously, it was a great road trip with kind of our most complete game coming at the end (4-2 win in Los Angeles on Thursday). But I think just kind of growing as a team in consistency, game in, game out. . . I don’t know if home and away has anything to do with it. We want to bring that energy to home. I mean, it was a great crowd in here tonight and we kind of let him down with the slow start.”
The Canucks’ worst games this season have all been on home ice.
Does that make losing worse?
“It does,” Soucy said. “I mean, we want to play well in front of our fans, especially when they show up like they did early in this game tonight. They were loud and we could feel the buzz in the building, and it hurts letting them down, especially with how the last two have gone.”
After surging back from a 3-0 deficit on second-period goals two minutes apart from Elias Pettersson and Filip Hronek, the Canucks looked like they ran out of energy during the second intermission.
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They were sloppy in the third, slack in coverage and unable to stop the Oilers power play.
Connor Brown started the scoring spree at 6:10 of the third period as two Oilers outworked four Canucks for a loose puck in front of Lankinen.
Edmonton’s other Connor, McDavid, scored easily from Zach Hyman’s rebound at 7:16, 10 seconds after Hronek was penalized for holding, and Brett Kulak made it 6-2 at 8:08 with a low shot from the left wing that rattled through Lankinen.
About the only goal as bad as that one that the Canuck has allowed this season came at 11:05, when Brown’s shot from distance handcuffed Lankinen, although it may have nicked defenceman Noah Juulsen’s stick.
The only positive for Vancouver in the final frame is that Silovs, who has started only three games this season while managing to save just 80 per cent of opposition shots, got nine minutes of mop-up time to work on his game and stopped four shots.
“Obviously disappointed I wasn’t able to help the team win tonight,” Lankinen said. “A couple of goals here and there that I can do a better job. I take full responsibility to be better.”
“This guy’s a fighter,” Tocchet said. “He’s the least of our problems.”
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Far higher up the problem list is the Canucks’ slow starts. Even with their cannonball run through California, the Canucks have allowed the first goal in seven straight games.
It took the Oilers less than three minutes — after a cotton-ball soft holding call against Hughes on McDavid — to make it 1-0 when Leon Draisaitl scored from a scramble four seconds after the Edmonton power play ended.
“We’re not getting to our game early enough,” coach Rick Tocchet told reporters. “We’ve got a couple of guys who’ve got to understand how we have to play more predictable. I think we’re taking the puck back too much. We survived it after the first, but we’ve got to make sure that we stick to the game plan.”
Naturalstattrick.com had high-danger scoring chances 11-2 for the Oilers, and their expected-goals-for at five-on-five was 66 per cent.
The game only appeared to be as close as it was — until it wasn’t.
“Anytime you lose a game like that, it’s disappointing,” Hughes said. “Not just the third (period), but we probably didn’t play where we needed to play to beat a team like that. I think we’ve been playing some pretty good hockey, and we didn’t play that way tonight, and we’re just going to have to move forward and focus on practice tomorrow and getting better tomorrow.”
The Calgary Flames visit the Canucks on Tuesday.
