{"id":600262,"date":"2026-04-13T02:04:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T02:04:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/600262\/"},"modified":"2026-04-13T02:04:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T02:04:15","slug":"takeaways-canucks-find-some-joy-in-rally-filled-shootout-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/600262\/","title":{"rendered":"Takeaways: Canucks find some joy in rally-filled shootout win"},"content":{"rendered":"

After enduring months of misery, the Vancouver Canucks<\/a> finally found some joy Saturday by inflicting a little pain on others as they rallied three times to beat the San Jose Sharks 4-3 in a shootout.<\/p>\n

The Hockey Night in Canada nightcap, the warmup act to Scott Oake\u2019s final show on After Hours, was terrific entertainment and the win, oddly enough, seemed to mean nearly as much to the Canucks as losing a point did to the Sharks.<\/p>\n

The Canucks have 23 wins and 54 points, the Sharks 37 wins and 82 points. But neither team is going to the Stanley Cup Playoffs.<\/p>\n

Although not mathematically eliminated, the desperate Sharks needed both points from the last-overall Canucks to maintain any hope of catching the Los Angeles Kings for the final wild-card spot in the Western Conference.<\/p>\n

With three games remaining, the Sharks trail their Golden State rivals by five points. And the two teams between them in the standings, Nashville and Winnipeg, hold the tie-breaker over San Jose.<\/p>\n

So the Sharks, for all of their speed and blossoming skill and generational star Macklin Celebrini<\/a>\u2019s teenage greatness, are extremely likely to miss the post-season for the seventh straight year.<\/p>\n

The duration of the Sharks\u2019 rebuild, frequently trumpeted as a template to follow, is a sobering reminder about what may be in store for the rebuilding Canucks.<\/p>\n

But nobody on the team would have been thinking about that on Saturday night when the team, with 10 regulation losses in its previous 11 games, tied it 3-3 on Teddy Blueger\u2019s power-play goal with three minutes remaining in the third period, then won it on Linus Karlsson<\/a>\u2019s bar-down shot in the sixth round of the shootout.<\/p>\n

Canucks goalie Kevin Lankinen<\/a>, already the most successful in NHL history among goalies who have faced at least 50 shootout attempts, stuffed five of six San Jose shooters. Celebrini\u2019s goal (like, who else would score for San Jose?) in Round 2 of the tie-breaker is the only shot that has beaten Lankinen in 23 attempts this season. Yes, Lankinen has denied 22 of 23 shooters (95.7 per cent). IN THE NHL!<\/p>\n

Karlsson, a rookie, was mobbed on the ice by teammates after his first shootout goal. Blueger celebrated his tying goal \u2014 a shot past Yaroslav Askarov\u2019s glove after the Canuck gathered the loose puck from Karlsson\u2019s charge to the net \u2014 like it was a playoff winner.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It may be the closest thing the Canucks get to a playoff game, although their final three contests may all have significant playoff implications in the Pacific Division: Sunday in Anaheim against the Ducks, Tuesday at home against the Kings and Thursday on the road against the Edmonton Oilers.<\/p>\n

The Canucks rallied three times against the Sharks, getting a two-for-four performance from their power play and tying goals from Marco Rossi and Jake DeBrusk before Blueger.<\/p>\n

Vancouver also killed a four-on-three San Jose power play in overtime to get to the shootout. The Canucks outshot the Sharks 28-18 in the final two periods of regulation time, so they certainly didn\u2019t \u201csteal\u201d this one.<\/p>\n

For an organization that has a habit of impaling itself, the Canucks showed a lot of class Saturday morning by inviting Scott Oake into their dressing room and presenting the retiring HNIC reporter-host a jersey and silver puck engraved with Oake\u2019s achievements and the names of family members.<\/p>\n

\u201cGrowing up in Canada, watching Hockey Night in Canada … in our living room was special to me,\u201d Canucks coach Adam Foote told reporters in San Jose. \u201cAnd then one day getting a chance to be interviewed by him was a very big moment for myself and my family. He\u2019s been a class act, very professional. What a career he had. It was nice to see him speak to our players today, and Brock Boeser presented him with a gift. It was nice, it was a good moment. It will be hard to see him not there anymore (on TV), but I\u2019m happy for him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scott Oake\u2019s son, Bruce, died of an accidental drug overdose in 2011. And Oake\u2019s wife, Annie, lost a battle with cancer 10 years later. But not before she and Scott founded the Bruce Oake Recovery Center in Winnipeg to help fight the addiction that took their son. Bruce had been evicted from a treatment centre in Calgary a week before his death.<\/p>\n

Hockey Night in Canada has always felt like it belongs to us. But After Hours, which was curated for viewers, belonged to Oake. It allowed players to be known as people, which is what Scott intended, I think, and capped Saturday nights on CBC for more than a generation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was honoured to be invited by Scott to co-host three times \u2014 and I still don\u2019t care how many people he asked before he made it to me. These appearances are among my most treasured moments in a career in media, which transitioned from The Vancouver Sun to Sportsnet in 2017, partly because Scott, who barely knew me, lobbied on my behalf.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So I am biased. Oake is brilliant at what he does \u2014 what he has done for hockey viewers. But truly, 50 years from now, what people will know him for is helping save lives through the treatment centre named after his son. That\u2019s a legacy that will trump nearly everyone\u2019s in hockey.<\/p>\n

DeBrusk\u2019s rebound goal from Filip Hronek\u2019s point shot on Vancouver\u2019s first power play was the winger\u2019s 20th\u00a0of the season. And that means something.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, it\u2019s a milestone,\u201d DeBrusk told Sportsnet before the Canucks departed for California. \u201cBut at the beginning of the season, my goal wasn’t to hit 20 goals. I was aiming for more. I was close to 30 last year (a career-high 28), and I wanted to improve. Obviously, with everything that’s happened … this has been the hardest year of my career to get there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI’ve had one or two seasons where I was right there, at 18 or 19, which pisses me off seeing that. I don’t want to be sitting there (with 19) at the end of the year, even a year like this where, you know, everything’s pretty much not gone right. It\u2019s not easy to score in this league, so if you went away with 20 after everything that’s happened, I’m not going to say I’m happy about it, but it\u2019s something.\u201d<\/p>\n

DeBrusk tied the shootout with his familiar flip shot under the bar after Celebrini put the Sharks ahead in Round 2.<\/p>\n

Celebrini finished with two assists, giving him 14 points in seven games against his hometown Canucks, and his astounding season at age 19 is Hart Trophy-worthy. With 42 goals and 110 points, he has almost doubled his nearest teammate, Will Smith, who has 23 goals and 56 points. Literally, no one has been more valuable to his team this season than Celebrini.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But he is probably not leading the Sharks to the playoffs and, rightly or wrongly, that has always been a major vote-reducer in Hart Trophy balloting. Celebrini is already one of the top 10 players in the world, possibly top five. He deserves to be a Hart finalist this season, regardless of how the Sharks finish. But we wonder if enough voting members of the Professional Hockey Writers\u2019 Association will put him ahead of Nikita Kucherov, Nathan MacKinnon and Connor McDavid if San Jose doesn\u2019t get in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After enduring months of misery, the Vancouver Canucks finally found some joy Saturday by inflicting a little pain…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":600263,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194298],"tags":[49,48,55],"class_list":["post-600262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-vancouver","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-vancouver"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600262\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/600263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}