Checking From Behind Pulling No Punches

It wasn't the performance the Canucks were looking for out of their troops. It wasn't how they wanted Andrew Raycroft to finish off his outings as Luongo's replacement; and it certainly wasn't the way they wanted Luongo to get back into game action.

The first shot of the game beat Raycroft and not too many fans were upset other than the fact that it was an unfortunate goal. A few minutes later, off the draw, Boyes took a shot that was deflected by Perron to make it 2-0 and fans felt it was a strong tip "what are you gunna do?" Then Erik Johnson walks right through a few Canucks, and feeds it back door for David Backes, but it goes off of Pettinger's skate along the way and into the net. It had fans saying "you can't blame Raycroft for that one." Then under a minute later, David Perron skates himself into the high slot and beats Raycroft over the glove. "There it is!" shout fans. "There's the goal he always let in when he played for Toronto."

And that would do it for Raycroft. He played the exact same game he used to play while wearing a Maple Leafs jersey. A few strange goals would go in where you couldn't blame him, and then he's let in the soft ones. It puts the team in a position where they cannot possibly win. His hot streak was over and it was time to put in Luongo.

But last night cannot be solely blamed on Raycroft. The Canucks, to put it simply, stunk. Burrows, Bernier and Salo were each -3 on the night, Edler and Sedin were -2, Pettinger, Johnson, Rypien and Mitchell were all -1. That's 9 players who were in the minus column after a 6-1 loss.

The Blues scored four goals in 7:36, and 3 goals were within 1:54 of each other. Raycroft finished out the first period, and Luongo came in for the final 40 in which he let in 2 goals on 17 shots.

"Obviously it was a tough first period," Raycroft said. "Four goals in eight minutes is not good enough."

Head coach Alain Vignault summed up the Canucks performance perfectly:

"They beat us to loose pucks, they were the better team 1-on-1 and they had better chances obviously," Canucks coach Alain Vigneault said of the Blues. "They played real well. That team came out real hard. Their execution was real good and they took it to us real hard in the first period. They had some quality chances and they buried them."

Roberto Luongo said that from all the terrible things that went wrong, there was a positive. "That's the only positive thing," Luongo said. "I got some minutes, but it's tough. You don't want to come in situations like that."

Despite scoring six goals in the game, including a hat trick by David Perron and a four point night for Brad Boyes, Paul Kariya (pointless in 8) and Keith Tkachuk (pointless in 5) did not register a single point.

"It's always good to get a goal, and it's even better to get two, and even better to get three," Perron said. "The most important thing was we got a lot of shots. We got some goals, finally, so it felt good."

The game featured 3 fights through the final 40, as the Canucks left the ice disappointed and frustrated. Tanner Glass became Cam Janssen's punching bag for over a minute; and there was a scrum at the end of the game that had Willie Mitchell reaching over the linesmen to throw punches at Roman Polak.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE RECAP OF THE GAME

The Canucks will now travel to Detroit where Luongo will start in goal for a battle with the Red Wings.

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Micheal A. Aldred

michealaldred@hotmail.com