The Canucks have won their past five season openers. They’ll go for six in a row Wednesday night.
FIRST GAME
Wednesday
Vancouver Canucks vs. Edmonton Oilers
7 p.m., Rogers Place, TV: SNET, SNETP, SN360; Radio: SNET 650 AM
BIG MATCHUP
Connor McDavid vs. Bo Horvat
McDavid had some rust in his two pre-season tilts after a knee ligament tear in April, but he hasn’t slowed down any and has 372 points in his 287 NHL games. McDavid has 41 goals in each of the last two seasons and while he won’t say it, this might be the year he shoots for 50 and is a contender for the Maurice Richard trophy.
He won’t have sidekick Leon Draisaitl on his line to start the season, though. Horvat is the Canucks’ Ryan O’Reilly as a two-way player. Nobody took more faceoffs last year than Horvat (2,018, 53.7 per cent) who also had 61 points.
FIVE KEYS TO THE GAME
1.) Starting strong
The Canucks have won their past five season openers. They’ll go for six in a row Wednesday night.
It’s a matchup of teams that both missed the playoffs last season and finished near the bottom of the Western Conference. The Canucks (35-36-11, 81 points) were 12th in the 15-team conference, and the Oilers (35-38-9, 79 points) were 14th, ahead of only the Los Angeles Kings.
“It’s no secret we haven’t been a great team for the last few years,” Canucks coach Travis Green said. “When I came in here two years ago, we talked about making improvements, and the way you make improvements is you get younger players in that help your team, you sign different players or other guys get better on your team that are here already.
“I think we’ve had a combination of all three things happening probably every year that I’ve been here, and we want to slowly keep getting better.”
2.) Waiting on captaincy
While McDavid is starting his fourth season with the C, the Canucks are delaying naming their captain until their home opener next Wednesday against Los Angeles. It’ll almost surely be Horvat with maybe the retired Henrik Sedin handing the captaincy over to the all-purpose centre in a ceremony at centre ice.
The Canucks want the fanfare for their faithful, not having Horvat start with a new C on the road.
3.) Shuffling the deck
With fourth-liner Tyler Motte out with an upper-body problem, Loui Eriksson slides into his right-wing slot as a pretty expensive ($6 million) fourth-line forward, albeit one who still does do a lot of little things.
While we’ve known for some time that Elias Pettersson would line up better with Micheal Ferland and Brock Boeser while Bo Horvat will be centring J.T. Miller and Tanner Pearson, Monday’s news that Sven Baertschi would start the season in Utica made for a clearer picture on the bottom two lines, where Brandon Sutter and Jay Beagle are the centres. Josh Leivo and Jake Virtanen will flank Sutter, while Beagle will have Eriksson on a wing opposite Tim Schaller, who is looking to show he’s much closer to the player we all thought he could be when he signed with the Canucks, rather than the ghost-like figure we saw much of in 2018-19.
4.) Centres of attention
Edmonton Oilers coach Dave Tippett has been thinking of going with McDavid, Draisaitl and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins as his 1-2-3 centres taking Draisaitl off the No. 1 line left-wing spot with McDavid for the time being, but with a slight medical problem for Tomas Jurco, Draisaitl will slide into the LW hole with RNH on the No. 2 line instead.
Former Oilers’ bench boss Ken Hitchcock has said that having McDavid and Leon on opposite lines was a huge headache for opposing teams while having them together was a 5-on-2 checking matchup. We’ll see if that’s the case with Draisaitl and Nugent-Hopkins together.
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5.) Who’s in net?
Mikko Koskinen was the Oilers’ No. 1 after Cam Talbot got traded last February and his $4.5 million cap hit makes him that on paper and twice a month at payday, but Tippett may go with his ex-Arizona tender Mike Smith for the home opener.
Smith only got into 60 minutes of pre-season action because he had pneumonia, half of Koskinen, but he might lean on his older goalie instead — maybe because the Canucks have a good book on Koskinen after playing him four times last season and they beat him in pre-season here.
At the Canucks end of the ice, Jacob Markstrom will start and it’s likely he’ll get a good run over the first handful of games to the season, given there’s plenty of time between all the games.
SICK BAY
Oilers: Riley Sheahan (concussion), Joel Persson (shoulder), Tomas Jurco (medical procedure).
Canucks: Antoine Roussel (knee), Tyler Motte (upper body).
GAME DAY LINES
OILERS (Projected)
Forwards
Joakim Nygard — Connor McDavid — James Neal
Leon Draisaitl — Ryan Nugent-Hopkins — Zack Kassian
Markus Granlund — Gaetan Haas — Alex Chiasson
Jujhar Khaira — Colby Cave — Josh Archibald
Defence
Darnell Nurse — Adam Larsson
Oscar Klefbom — Ethan Bear
Kris Russell — Matt Benning
Goal: Mike Smith, Mikko Koskinen
CANUCKS (Projected)
Forwards
Micheal Ferland — Elias Pettersson — Brock Boeser
Tanner Pearson — Bo Horvat — J.T. Miller
Josh Leivo — Brandon Sutter — Jake Virtanen
Tim Schaller — Jay Beagle — Loui Eriksson
Defence
Alex Edler — Tyler Myers
Quinn Hughes — Chris Tanev
Jordie Benn — Troy Stecher
Goal: Jacob Markstrom, Thatcher Demko
- with a file from Reuters
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October 02, 2019 at 07:17PM
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