GAME DAY || October 12, 2011 vs. Philadelphia Flyers

He's going to have to do better than that.  I know it wasn't really Lou's fault for a couple of them, but the Meszaros game winning goal is one that needs to be stopped.  Granted, he did save our asses on that wide open net Jagr had off of a rebound, which was the kind of Luongo that he needs to be 99% of the time.

The last significant time I can remember these two teams play was a few years ago, when the Canucks still had Matt Cooke and the Flyers' Jesse Boulerice came up and broke his stick on a cross check over Kesler's face. Remember that?  Anyways, I digress...

Vancouver Canucks are in a very interesting situation right now.  A city that used to be known as a goalie graveyard, is now home to possibly the best 1-2 (possibly 3 in Eddie Lack) combination of netminders in the league.

The formula the Canucks seem to be following right now is the ol' Rope-a-Dope, except it only works against terrible/mediocre teams.  It worked against Pittsburgh (kinda) and worked against Columbus, where we play like an AHL team by just high sticking and holding so we can work on our penalty kill.  At the end of the first, I'm not sure exactly what happened, but Bieksa and Hartnell had a little tussle.  It's usually a good thing to see Bieksa fired up like that, he almost always plays better afterwards.  There are the rare occasions though, where he just goes on a rampage and takes charging and roughing penalties, but I think those days are behind him.

After the half way point, it was the Canucks of yesteryear, dominating the half boards, making them pay on the power play.  I don't think that we give the Sedin's enough credit on the power play and not on the scoring end of it.  The zone entry play that they do coming through the middle of the ice, then doing a little drop pass to get over the blue line, then back to the defenseman and then back to the Sedin's...flawless.  You don't really notice it until you have somebody else try to do the same thing.  Hodgson, despite having a pretty strong game even strength, wasn't up to par when he tried his luck at quarterbacking the power play.  Gaining the offensive zone was a struggle, and when he finally did, the only thing left to do was shoot it on net from the blueline and force Bryzgalov to cover up.  Look for it next time, watch how seamless it is.  Not to mention that 90 foot saucer pass from Henrik to Daniel, then Daniel one-times that pass as soon as the puck hits the ice...just lovely.

It's pretty hard to say that the defense played well in a 5-4 game, but I thought they did a decent job at shutting down most of the big guns.  Edler had his hands full with Jagr, who still is a monster on the puck.  He basically just gets the puck and backs himself where ever he wants to go (Shaq would be proud).

This was just one of those back and forth games where the goalies should have been a little sharper at times, where we should have shown up for the first 20-30 minutes (again) and we need a little bit more of a contribution from the 3rd and 4th lines.  It's pretty hard to fault them for anything really, when all they're expected to do is shutdown the first line and rough them up a bit, but a little more shots on net would be stupendous.  There was a sequence there in the first where they had them hemmed in, I think Hodgson was stuck out there with Weise and Volpatti and they had some sustained pressure.

Anyways, Luongo could have been better at times, but the biggest issue is the penalties.  Maybe the Canucks should just scrimmage for about 30 minutes before the game, so they can get all the horrible hockey out of their systems before the actual game starts.