TORONTO, ON — The Vancouver Canucks hadn’t won in regulation since Christmas and had dropped points in the first three games of this gauntlet East Coast swing so far.
They were coming off of one of their least inspiring offensive performances in years, after which their plane got stuck in Raleigh, North Carolina overnight. On Saturday, Vancouver landed in Toronto at noon and only arrived at their hotel about five hours prior to puck drop — a police escort apparently failed to expedite their travel down the QEW.
This Canucks side had every reason to drop another one on Saturday night, but the club instead managed one of their most complete and impressive performances of the season. This is the Canucks side that we saw in wins over Colorado and Florida in December, a team capable of shutting down elite sides and handling their pushes, while padding their margin of victory.
On this night in the so-called “centre of the hockey universe,” the Canucks’ best players were better than their opponent’s best players — and it wasn’t just Quinn Hughes carrying the load this time.
On this night, Vancouver dominated the Toronto Maple Leafs, coming away with a sorely needed 3-0 victory to salvage some sense of good feeling from what’s been a difficult road trip overall.
Here are three takeaways from Vancouver’s impressive, improbable get-right victory in Toronto on Saturday night.
The top-six tweak pays off early
After what was one of the most popgun offensive performances we’ve ever seen from this Canucks core in Carolina on Friday, Rick Tocchet tweaked his lineup and in particular his top-six forward group.
Elias Pettersson skated with Brock Boeser and Jake DeBrusk, and was more frequently self-matched with Quinn Hughes against the top end of the Toronto lineup. Frankly, Pettersson’s deployment patterns on Saturday more closely matched how the Canucks have utilized J.T. Miller for much of this season.
Miller, meanwhile, skated with Conor Garland and, earned a cookie after his deployment dropped significantly this week following a bad penalty late in the third period against the Montreal Canadiens, Nils Höglander. That line played far less frequently with Hughes and logged more minutes against Toronto’s middle six.
The swap worked out, and it worked out immediately.
Early in the first period on a Canucks defensive zone draw, Tyler Myers outbattled Mitch Marner to secure the Canucks a winger win and help the club orchestrate an exit into the neutral zone. Brock Boeser skated hard to beat a Maple Leafs defender to the puck, and Vancouver was able to control, with Pettersson working the puck out from traffic at the front of the net and passing the puck to Myers at the point.
Myers unleashed a hard, high slapper and Boeser deflected it deftly past Dennis Hildeby to spot Vancouver a much-needed opening goal.
The context of a tired team that traveled the day of a game is critical to note here. Getting off to a hot start is essential when you’re on the less-rested side because it’s difficult to match your opponents’ pace as the game goes along in these situations. Chasing the game with tired legs is how crooked losses, and even injuries, tend to occur.
Vancouver’s first period spotted them some margin for error, and it was the top-six that drove that. Both the Miller and Pettersson lines had excellent looks, and ran show in terms of the run of play. At the end of 20 minutes, it was Vancouver’s top six that had earned the club an early lead, while out-attempting the Leafs 11-1 in their minutes, out-shooting them seven to nothing and, of course, outscoring them one to nil at five-on-five.
Quinn Hughes’ ridiculousness
Asked to arrive on the day of the game and play with one good hand, the context didn’t matter. This was a Hughes takeover game.
The Vancouver blue liner, who isn’t the clear Norris Trophy favourite simply because it seems not enough voters are paying close enough attention, was dominant against the Leafs. And to their credit, Toronto did a pretty good job defending him. They harassed him with a level of intensity and effectiveness that we don’t often see. Hughes even took some hits from Maple Leafs forecheckers, an extreme rarity given Hughes’ elusiveness.
No matter, Hughes was the decisive individual that determined the outcome of this game. He scored the key 2-0 insurance marker, on a delayed penalty six-on-five in which Vancouver’s best players managed to snap the puck around perfectly for an extended stretch before a Hughes point shot beat Hildeby (it was scored as an own goal, meaning it was credited to Hughes on an unassisted basis).
Then early in the third period, before the Maple Leafs could even find their footing and mount a push against a tired Canucks side, Hughes switched from his strong left side to the right side, walking the blue line with his usual slickness before skating down the right-side half wall and finding Kiefer Sherwood with a sumptuous drop pass. Sherwood made no mistake, and Vancouver’s losing streak was over.
what a move by Quinn Hughes to setup Kiefer Sherwood to make it 3-0 #Canucks pic.twitter.com/83uR0C3Eny
— Lucasparmenter23 (@Lucasparmenter0) January 12, 2025
On a night in which Vancouver’s best players outperformed Toronto’s, Hughes was the brightest star on the ice. This was the sort of performance that only one defender in the sport is capable of, flat out.
On the big stage, in the city that he grew up in, against the team his father worked for, it was Vancouver’s captain who stole the show — and two points from the Maple Leafs.
Elias Pettersson’s defensive pop
Pettersson’s physical assertiveness and the pop in his skating stride looked to be back on Saturday night in Toronto. We’ve been waiting for Pettersson to make this sort of impact on a game.
With the return of Pettersson’s skating pop, came a level of two-way effectiveness that, frankly, has usually been typical of Pettersson’s game throughout his career, but has been oddly and mysteriously absent for much of the past 11 months or so. It was back and back in a major way on Saturday, as Pettersson was finishing hits, making exceptional defensive plays — both of the positional variety and of the desperation sliding variety — and doing a creditable shutdown job on the Maple Leafs throughout the contest.
The signature defensive play came at about the mid-way mark of the third period, when Pettersson managed to break up a Matthew Knies scoring chance that would’ve been an automatic goal if not for Pettersson’s goal-mouth intervention. It was a spot of gritty, positional brilliance and prevented the Maple Leafs from building any last-gasp momentum in the getting-late-but-still-early-enough-to-mount-a-comeback portion of the final frame.
If Pettersson is dialed in like this and can impact the game in all three zones the way he did on Saturday, that’s something that can alter this hockey club’s trajectory.
(Photo: John E. Sokolowski / Imagn Images)
