Hughes leads the way, Canucks shut out Blues in dominant fashion

VANCOUVER – With the sky falling in Edmonton and Calgary these days, it’s unusually sunny around the Vancouver Canucks. Even the weather is good.

The National Hockey League team that has been ducking towering clouds of cumulonimbus the last three years on Friday followed its best game of the season with its best period, throwing thunder and lightning at the St. Louis Blues by outshooting them 19-3 in the opening frame on their way to a 5-0 victory at Rogers Arena.

Shot attempts in the first 20 minutes were 35-4 and, no, that does not seem possible. But it happened.

The Canucks are still at the formative stage of their rebirth as a defensively-stout, two-way team under coach Rick Tocchet, and seven games in is still an eternity away from 82 games completed.

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But they simply overwhelmed and over-ran the Blues, themselves typically a professional, conscientious group, in the first half of the game when Vancouver scored four times over a spell of 21 minutes. The only guy who was behind the Blues defence more than the Canucks was St. Louis goalie Jordan Binnington, who tried to keep his team afloat but eventually was bested by Vancouver netminder Thatcher Demko.

The Canucks seem to be getting faster, or at least playing faster, by the game as they apply Tocchet’s teachings to meet pressure with pressure and defend by moving forward against their opponents rather than retreating when the other team has the puck.

The new-look Canucks will be tested again Saturday when they face the New York Rangers, with Vancouver the “tired” team playing on a second straight night like St. Louis did Friday after dusting the struggling Calgary Flames 3-0 less than 24 hours earlier.

For the moment, the Flames and equally-troubled Edmonton Oilers are streaking away from the Canucks as the teams move in opposite directions in the Pacific Division.

Like we said, it’s early. But Vancouver’s well-earned 5-2-0 start amid a difficult, road-heavy schedule, would have sounded preposterous a year ago when the Canucks went 0-5-2 in their first seven games under previous coach Bruce Boudreau.

“It’s a good feeling,” veteran defenceman Tyler Myers said Friday. “It’s a good feeling to know what’s expected of you when you step on the ice. When you dive into the details of it, I think that’s really what it comes down to. When you make as many changes as a lot of guys have been through the last couple of years, it’s easy to get discombobulated — a lot of different thoughts running through the mind. So to have the stability that we’ve had the last six or eight months. . . and to see it paying off, it’s nice to see that success.

“We had moments last year where it seemed like we put together a good grind on the road and we’d come back and we’d almost take a step back. We want to start changing the way we approach each and every game and start developing some consistency within the room. It was a great mindset coming in tonight; we knew they were coming off a game last night and we wanted to jump on them early. And we did. We have to show that we can do it again tomorrow night.”

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The most impressive big-picture aspect for the Canucks over the last few days is that they ended a marathon road trip Tuesday in Nashville by holding the Predators to just 18 shots in what Tocchet described as a “professional” victory, then built another one to open the homestand when there might have been a lag in energy or attention or at least a loss of momentum.

Instead, they simply steamrolled the Blues.

“That’s about as well as you can play in a sense of playing fast and (getting) pucks to the net, and shots and opportunities,” Canuck J.T. Miller said. “You’re not going to get periods like that all the time. But I think the important part is when you get one … keep playing the same way.”

“I think we were just ready to play,” captain Quinn Hughes said. “We just jumped on them in the first and were ready to play. We’re going to have to try to bring that again tomorrow.”

After targeting his offensive-zone play for improvement during summer training, Hughes scored the first two Vancouver goals on Friday, one a laser wrist shot and the other a lucky bounce off Blues centre Kevin Hayes as the Canucks poured rubber at the net like they were shift workers at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.

Hughes now has three goals in seven games, nearly half of the seven he scored all of last season. Incredibly, the Canucks have now outscored opponents 16-1 this season in all situations when their best player is on the ice.

“I’m happy,” Hughes said. “I’ve specifically told you in the last couple of years that I could see myself scoring a little bit more. Last year it didn’t really happen for me, but I thought that my mindset was changing a little bit and then this year just carried (over).

“I feel really dangerous. Part of it is my body, just being able bring it every night. Like, I feel really good. And then just working on the things I worked on the summer: attacking and beating guy and being able to get a shot off. My whole mindset is attacking more and shooting more. And the last part of that is playing with a guy that can really, really give (me the puck). I mean, he’s a great, great player. He’s finding me so much and it’s getting me three or four extra touches a night.”

Hughes was speaking of new defence partner Filip Hronek, who has five assists and is plus-nine in his first seven games.

Phil Di Giuseppe, Miller and Ilya Mikheyev all scored on breakaways for the Canucks. Miller’s was the most important one, coming shorthanded to make it 4-0 at 8:52 of the middle period after Blues defencemen Torey Krug atrociously passed the puck on to Canuck Elias Pettersson’s stick in the neutral zone.

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Demko finished with 22 saves, all the hard ones coming with his team comfortably ahead in the second half of the game. Shot attempts finished 70-35 for Vancouver.

“He was probably pretty bored the first half of the game there,” Miller said of his goalie, “but then. . . he made some unreal saves in the second half where I thought we could have been a lot sharper than we were. He was a big part of the win like he always is.

“We have to be mature in a sense that this is just a game. Enjoy it, and we get to play again tomorrow against a really good team that’s hungry and that’s been playing well. Learn from what we didn’t like. . . and keep building off what we did like. We talked about (preparing) day by day the first day of camp, and nothing’s changed.”

Actually, a lot has changed.

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