Canucks Toughness Issues
It’s a prevailing conversation these days: The Canucks and their vulnerability.
How many times does captain and star defenceman Quinn Hughes have to get run before someone does something ab0ut it? And given the structure of rosters and the preferred make-up of modern players, just how tough is it to protect your stars?
Apparently, it’s difficult. Team toughness exists in the NHL, the pack mentality, but Vancouver apparently isn’t one of the teams that possesses the characteristic.
No opponent is skating away scared. The same could be said for the Seattle Kraken down the road. For visitors there, it’s like the 1990’s clothing brand: “No Fear”.
“You want a pack mentality, you want to be tough to play against,” Canucks head coach Rick Tocchet said last week. “You don’t want people to take liberties against anybody. It’s not just your star players, it’s everybody.”
And?
In his return from injury, Hughes was hammered a number of times in Calgary on March 12th in a 4-3 overtime win over the Flames. Although they’re not a huge team, Calgary is under-rated physically. Or maybe it’s their approach.
“I think it’s more hard work and we try to play in the face,” Flames head coach Ryan Huska told Vancouver Hockey Insider back on February 2nd in Seattle. “We have one defenceman (Brayden) Pachal who likes to finish hits, like the one we saw here tonight, but more of it is to just play a harder, grittier game.”
Well, yeah coach, that’s what we’re talking about here.
Tocchet, 10th all-time in NHL penalty minutes, a shit disturber, pest, fighter, who played a constant physical game, had a hard time answering the question the way he wanted to Saturday night after Jason Dickinson of the Blackhawks hit and injured Canucks centre Filip Chytil with a cheap shot. It came one game after Connor Zary of the Flames blatantly elbowed and knocked down Vancouver D-man Elias Pettersson, an infraction that earned Zary a two-game suspension.
“I think ahhh … that’s a touchy one for me,” ‘Tock’ said. “I still think we have guys that … go out there and will go by their bench and stuff, but ahhh, that one there, I don’t know how to answer this. Would I like somebody to grab somebody, is that what you’re asking me? I don’t think that’s today’s game, I don’t know. But we have to have a pack of wolves mentality.”
But they don’t. And apparently they can’t do what Tocchet would have done: Punched Zary out. In today’s NHL, you mostly won’t.
Enforcers riding shot-gun with superstar skaters has gone the way of the dodo bird. Even having three or four middleweight maniacs is extremely rare. Thus, Tocchet’s in a quandary.
Canucks management needs to build a grittier, more physical roster. When your smallest player, Conor Garland, is your biggest pain-in-the-ass and most likely to get into it; you’ve got a problem.
“Well talk about that another night,” Tocchet said while concluding the topic.
Earlier Canucks:
— Off (Chicago) Win, Canucks Face Huge Opportunity – (it didn’t work out)
