Drance: Canucks fall to Devils in ‘Hughes Bowl’ — a concerning, joyous spectacle

For 59 minutes, the “Hughes Bowl” at Rogers Arena was a pyrotechnic hockey spectacle of the highest order.

The New Jersey Devils rolled into town for a family affair on Tuesday night, with Vancouver Canucks captain Quinn Hughes’ brothers Luke and Jack in tow. And in the early going, the team with more Hugheses looked set to dispatch the Canucks with disturbing ease after a four-goal first period.

The Canucks, however, rallied. Even though Luke and Jack scored and the Devils built two separate three-goal leads, Vancouver kept pushing. With Quinn picking up multiple assists late in the third period, Vancouver levelled the score 5-5.

All three Hughes brothers are playing in the same game for the first time in their NHL careers.

Quinn, Jack, and Luke Hughes before the game.

📸 Derek Cain/Getty Images pic.twitter.com/RU8fH8XkR1

— The Athletic NHL (@TheAthleticNHL) December 6, 2023

The game had a ton of goals and even more storylines. Canucks killer Tyler Toffoli returned to town, as did Curtis Lazar. Former Canucks head coach Travis Green was in the building and received a fitting, polite acknowledgement from the home crowd when he was welcomed back in the first period.

For 59 minutes, this was easily the most entertaining game the Canucks had played all season. And then came the gut punch.

With under a minute to play and the Rogers Arena crowd roaring at a feverish pitch of the sort rarely heard in this city over the past decade, the Devils made a mistake. They messed up a line change. Confusingly, the Devils — dynamic but sloppy throughout the night — had only four players on the ice sheet at even strength late in the third period of a tied game.

Secretly short-handed, Devils blueliner John Marino dumped the puck into the Canucks end of the ice. The puck caromed around the end boards to Ian Cole, one of the Canucks’ sharpest and most reliable defensive players.

Cole picked the puck off the wall on his forehand with his back turned to Devils forward Ondrej Palat, who was forechecking down the left-side half-wall. Rather than reverse the puck to Filip Hronek, Cole, under light pressure, attempted to punt the puck on his backhand past Palat.

Then all hell broke loose.

The puck squirted past Palat, but Dakota Joshua was unable to handle it as he was angled off of the puck by Jesper Bratt. The puck slipped back to Kevin Bahl at the point and Elias Pettersson, with his winger caught on the wall, went to cut off the top. Bahl, however, went D-to-D as Devils centre Nico Hischier, belatedly, joined the play to give the Devils the appropriate number of skaters.

Suddenly the Devils’ error became their advantage. Confusion reigned as Hischier drove through the middle of the offensive zone to the net front.

With the puck at the right point, Marino found Palat with a clever high-low pass and Hronek left the net front to check him. But Palat found Bahl through a seam as Bratt circled the net unaccounted for by Joshua, the low forward, or Cole or Hronek, who was caught in no-man’s land.

The breakdown happened fast. There was a shot through traffic, a Thatcher Demko rebound, and suddenly there was Bratt, all alone in the Canucks crease, with an empty net to shoot on and the space and time to dig the dagger.

The silence that followed Bratt’s game winner was deafening; the air forcibly removed from a rowdy, engaged Rogers Arena.

“That last goal, they actually had four guys on the ice!” was how Canucks coach Rick Tocchet, sounding thoroughly exasperated, summarized the ill-fated sequence that cost Vancouver the game. “I think you could blame all five guys on the ice for that … I still don’t understand where guys were going on that play, we had time. That’s details. Details and details. That’s what we keep hammering these guys.”

If there was good news in a poor Vancouver performance, aside from the fact that they managed to eliminate two three-goal deficits with a third-period push that relied heavily on a spotty goaltending performance from Devils netminder Vitek Vanecek, it was that most of Vancouver’s errors were uncharacteristic.

In most of the 26 games Vancouver has played this season, Cole makes the right puckhandling decision under pressure and the late Bratt game winner doesn’t happen. The Canucks’ usually lethal power play capitalizes more than once on their multitude of opportunities. They don’t give up an odd-man rush every minute for the first five minutes of the game and don’t surrender a decent handful of Grade-A scoring chances in the opening frame, falling behind 4-2.

“It was on us,” Tocchet said. “Credit to them, I’m not taking away that they got the four goals, but we gave them four goals. You can’t have three guys in the corner and leave the front of the net. That’s not our system. We’ve been slacking a little bit on that. That’s on us, it’s on my ass, I’ve got to get these guys to do it more often.”

Vancouver is still off to a strong start and remains very well positioned to end its lengthy playoff drought with 33 points through their first 26 games, but the Canucks’ performance has been listing for the better part of a month now. After starting 10-2-1 in their first 13 games, Vancouver has gone 6-7-0 in 13 games since.

Mostly those losses haven’t been caused by the sort of defensive disorganization that afflicted them Tuesday night, but there’s a sense of bad habits creeping into their game. And a sense of regression to the mean, as well.

The seams are especially beginning to show at the top end of Vancouver’s lineup. Of late, particularly against contender-calibre teams, the Canucks have been soundly bested — by the Nathan MacKinnon line in Colorado before American Thanksgiving, by the Jack Eichel line last week and again by the Jack Hughes line on Tuesday night.

Tocchet and his staff deviated from their usual approach to tough matchups and attempted to contain the Devils’ warp-speed top line by matching it against the J.T. Miller line and a defence pair of Tyler Myers and Nikita Zadorov. It didn’t come close to working and was promptly abandoned after a disastrous first-period performance.

The Canucks only really found their footing late in the third period when Nils Höglander was promoted onto the Miller line in place of Andrei Kuzmenko.

Kuzmenko, an offensive specialist who nearly scored 40 goals last season, has sputtered significantly this season. He predictably isn’t producing the way he did in his first NHL campaign and he’s struggling to build trust with this coaching staff. Kuzmenko played only three shifts in the third period on Tuesday even though the Canucks trailed throughout.

Fresh off of two consecutive healthy scratches last week, Kuzmenko struggled throughout the game. He was poor on the power play, where he was too reluctant to shoot, and surrendered an odd-man rush with a poor puckhandling decision in the first period. He brought nothing additive to the Miller line at even strength, which immediately got going after he was demoted.

“I’m tired of answering questions about him. We came back, it worked out,” Tocchet said tersely when asked what he’s not seeing from Kuzmenko. “He’s got to forecheck, let’s start with that.”

Increasingly it feels like Tocchet is trawling his roster for some potential answers, for a spark. He found one this week in Sam Lafferty, who scored another key goal on another deflection Tuesday night, but most of the other potential answers are 5-foot-8 forwards.

Luckily this team got off to such a hot start that it has some time to find its game now. A 13-game stretch playing sub-.500 hockey can be fatal after a slow start, but Vancouver did such good work early on that it’ll be fine provided its recent inconsistency doesn’t continue for too much longer. And so long as it doesn’t spiral from here.

The Canucks have also earned the benefit of the doubt. One ugly, lackadaisical defensive effort shouldn’t outweigh the 25 games in which Vancouver has regularly played solid, structural team defense.

So while there’s some alarming Canucks fodder that’s fair to take away from the Hughes Bowl, mostly it was just a messy, high-octane affair. And a ton of fun to watch.

(Top photo of, left to right, Luke Hughes, Quinn Hughes and Jack Hughes: Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)