by Joel Smart (Sports Editor)
Email:cascade.sports[at]ufv.ca
The Canucks have begun to spiral down a dreaded but familiar drain, as a Sedin slump rocks the team to its delicate core. No team is immune from a couple of bad games in a row, but the Canuck faithful have to be feeling a little nervous after watching the team play in the last couple weeks. While another winning streak could be just around the corner, the losses against Chicago, Phoenix, and even Pittsburgh and Buffalo in just under a week has shown a side of this team that we had hoped would stay buried until sometime after 2012 when the world comes crashing to an end.
When the Canucks are on their game, you’ll notice crisp, often simple, and effective passes out of their zone. What we noticed in the last week was a Canucks team that looked uncomfortable holding the puck; even the godlike Ehrhoff looked mortal, whiffing helplessly on several passes. It has been a miserable and sloppy affair for the Canucks. I suspect a careful analysis would find the amount of Canucks randomly slipping and falling on the ice for no apparent reason made a sharp rise during this period as well. The team’s power play, so successful for them during their winning streak, lost its magic touch. Not that it mattered on Sunday night, when the squeaky clean Coyotes nary batted an eyelash at a Canuck player.
Some of it was just bad luck, though. Speaking of eyelashes, Taylor Pyatt scored two goals in that Coyotes game solely because the hockey gods wanted to reward Pyatt for his fine choice of mascara. Modern science has yet to explain a proper defence against a harmless looking shot that ricochets off of several bodies in front of the net before going in. That isn’t to say the Canucks’ defence could not improve, however, as clearly demonstrated by the highly-touted Hamhuis, whose aching foot was surely to blame for the disastrous overtime giveaway in Buffalo that cost Cory Schneider his first loss of the season.
It comes down to the fact that, as a team, the Canucks are just playing badly right now. It’s painful to watch, but it will likely subside before fans of the team are forced to douse their eyeballs in salt to relieve the burning pain. The real trouble is that the team, whether they’re playing really well or really poorly, is awfully inconsistent. To a certain degree, this is true of all teams, but the Canucks seem to embody the term.
The dilemma is especially worrying because there doesn’t seem to be an obvious cure. There is no simple answer or clear individual to blame. It could simply be the curse of a hockey market where pressure to succeed is particularly daunting to key players; Detroit seems to have a solution for that, though. Part of the problem has to be in coaching and management of the team.
If the upcoming battles against our main rivals and divisional enemies is not enough to awaken the Canucks from their discombobulated nightmare, we may all be forced to see just how deep this rabbit hole goes. It might just be time for Mason Raymond to invest in some of Pyatt’s “Lash Blasting” cosmetics.
