Growth of Kuzmenko easy to see in Canucks’ win over Avalanche

VANCOUVER – He didn’t know what he was in for when he came to play hockey in Canada, but Andrei Kuzmenko said he found out during the Vancouver Canucks’ home opener last October.

After losing the first five games of their National Hockey League season on the road, the Canucks came home and were embarrassed 5-2 by the Buffalo Sabres on Oct. 22. The team was booed off the ice and renounced by a couple of fans who threw their Canuck jerseys on the ice.

“I’m watching, really?” Kuzmenko, the Russian rookie, recalled Thursday. “OK, I know this is Canada. I understand there’s pressure. There’s a lot of pressure; this is normal. But yes, I like this situation.

“I like this situation because I like to play in pressure. There’s a lot of moments and. . . I understand when I go on ice, it is full focus on ice, full focus on game, full focus on winning because it’s a difficult time for me and for my team.”

The season has been much more difficult for the Canucks than for the 26-year-old Kuzmenko, who would be a runaway Calder Trophy favourite were he not disqualified by his age. The most difficult time may have been the 48 hours that preceded Thursday’s 4-2 win against the Colorado Avalanche.

After the Canucks were booed off the ice again on Tuesday, following a 6-2 humiliation against the New York Islanders in which Vancouver essentially failed to compete the last two periods, coach Bruce Boudreau wondered about the commitment and will of his players.

“I know I want to win,” he said.

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That was followed by a difficult practice on Wednesday and an uncomfortable team meeting that was like an intervention with Boudreau singling out several players for criticism. He also blamed himself for not getting them ready to play.

At 17-18-3 and about to pass the halfway mark of their season during a daunting five-game road trip that starts Sunday in Winnipeg, the Canucks have very likely already doomed their singular goal of making the Stanley Cup Playoffs in April.

But without a response on Thursday, after the two days that led to this latest referendum, the Canucks would have no chance. Their team would be dead.

Instead, they surged back from a two-goal deficit by scoring three times in 2 ½ minutes late in the second period, then controlled most of the third and yielded very little to Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar and the Avalanche until the final five minutes.

And Kuzmenko, the free agent from St. Petersburg who loves pressure, was the catalyst, scoring his 16^th and 17^th goals of the season two minutes apart to erase Colorado’s lead and launch the Canucks towards a crisis-cooling win.

“He has really continued to grow,” Boudreau said of the winger he sat out for a game in Boston in November. “I think he’s really a part of it. I mean, you could see on the second goal his excitement. He’s really invested in the same way everybody else was. His improvement from the beginning (of the season) to now, it was great.”

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Kuzmenko used his sublime hands to maneuver the puck in tight and create space for a backhand that he slid past Colorado goalie Alexandar Georgiev at 13:15 to make it 2-1, then displayed his scoring will by following up Elias Pettersson’s wraparound to jam the rebound under the netminder’s pad at 15:14.

When Colorado defenceman Devon Toews turned over the puck and Canuck Brock Boeser scored the go-ahead goal just 34 seconds later from a Bo Horvat rebound, Georgiev furiously smashed his paddle over the net and had to be calmed by Makar.

The Canucks outshot the Avalanche 43-31, limited the MacKinnon-Mikko Rantanen line at five-on-five and continued to take the game to the Avalanche in the third period.

“You see that and you go, ‘let’s do that again,’” Boudreau said. “I thought we played a pretty detailed game. I mean, a lot of good things happened out there but it’s something — again, we were just talking about it — we’ve got to bottle that up and do it every game.

“It’s really positive when you get that kind of response after all the stuff that went on in the last 48 hours. We got some great efforts from guys.”

The Canucks’ three shot blocks against the Islanders was an indictment of their effort. Against the Avalanche, they blocked 24 – seven of them by Luke Schenn and five by Curtis Lazar. They also outhit Colorado 29-24 and won 38 of 66 faceoffs. Horvat was 21-9 in the circle.

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“That’s the way we have to play to win; we have to do all of those things,” Boudreau said. “And when we do them all. . . it’s pretty to watch from the bench. You’re talking about committing to defend the other day well, and in the third period I thought that’s exactly what they did. They played for each other and it was really fun to watch.”

Winger J.T. Miller, who scored an empty-net goal as a gift from Pettersson, said of this week: “There was not really a lot of soul searching; we were just not doing our jobs. We weren’t competing hard enough and. . . on a regular basis. You take a look in the mirror and at some point realize that we get paid to do this and this is what we’re expected to do. You know, effort and commitment and blocking shots and playing physical, those are the easy things that we can control. Every time we seem to play that way, we get the results.”

Naturally, you wonder why they don’t play this way more often. Wins are fun.

“We did all the small things that really matter,” defenceman Oliver Ekman-Larsson said. “It’s stuff that we should always do. It shouldn’t be a once-in-a-while thing. That should always be our game, that should always be the game plan. I think everybody got the message.”

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