NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The Vancouver Canucks didn’t generate much, but they won Game 3.
What they created offensively was meagre. J.T. Miller called it a “one-and-done game” for his line, and the team as a whole registered just 12 shots on goal.
What they actually put on the scoreboard, however, and what they were actually able to generate on a night when the breakout got bogged down and they were pinned constantly in their own end of the rink, almost all of it came directly off Miller’s stick.
The Canucks had 13 scoring chances total on Friday night on Broadway, according to the PDOcast’s Dimitri Filipovic. Five of those scoring chances were personally taken by Miller. He also set up four more.
On a night when Vancouver won to come within two favourable results of the conference semifinal, Miller led the way, was the team’s heartbeat and was essentially the club’s entire offence.
No, it wasn’t a Ryan Kesler-like beast-mode performance, but Miller put the team on his back.
“I can’t say enough great things about him,” said Ian Cole of Miller’s performance and impact. “He’s one of our emotional leaders, he’s one of our elite players and we’re fortunate to have a lot of them. He’s a guy that everyone looks to to lift this team. He gets fiery, he’s not afraid to say what’s on his mind, but everyone knows it comes from a place of wanting to win and pushing himself and everyone around him to be the best they can be. You may get some feathers ruffled in the process, but everyone respects how he does it.”
While Miller is often at his most noticeable when he’s using his big frame and his elite first step to make loud plays — protecting the puck, making power forward moves, throwing bone-rattling hits — what makes him special and what won Game 3 for Vancouver is the quiet stuff that’s a product of what rests between Miller’s ears.
The cerebral nature of his game, and especially the way he thinks and executes on the power play.
On Friday, Miller played off a new weapon on Vancouver’s first power-play unit. Brock Boeser has been a fixture there all season, but on Friday, as the club swapped Conor Garland and Elias Lindholm on the unit, Boeser went back to the net front.
It’s a position Boeser was originally moved to during the 2019-20 season. He was dislodged from the left flank, in part, as a result of Miller’s dual-threat mastery of playing his downhill side in the 1-3-1 formation.
It wasn’t always a good fit, or a spot Boeser was happy to play. He’d been a productive goal scorer on the flank, and Vancouver’s power play cooked opponents regularly during that 2019-20 campaign with Boeser and Quinn Hughes and Elias Pettersson lined up on the outside of the 1-3-1.
With Bo Horvat’s genius-level finishing in the bumper, Hughes’ signal calling from the point, Pettersson’s one-timer reliably exerting gravity on penalty killers whether he’s scoring or not and Miller’s maestro act from that left flank, Boeser had to find a way to fit in. That meant figuring out how to play the net front, both as a distributor and as a screener.
It’s the latter part of Boeser’s net-front learning experience in which he leaned on Miller, a net-front fixture in his first several months with the Canucks and during his formative time with the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Among his Canucks teammates, Miller is famous for his relentless consumption of film. His donnish attention to detail. His hunger to find whatever edge he can.
Miller took Boeser under his wing, and taught him how to be more effective in layering traffic. Boeser did the work, but Miller played a crucial role in helping to mold his linemate into the screener he needed on Friday night.
If you watch Miller’s goal from Friday, the amount of nuance that creates the critical opening marker is astounding.
J.T. Miller scores on the Canucks first shot of the game!
That power play goal puts Vancouver up 1-0! #Canucks | #Preds
📽️: Sportsnet | NHL pic.twitter.com/I8xMerlixq— CanucksArmy (@CanucksArmy) April 27, 2024
The first thing to note is that Miller took the shot twice before beating Juuse Saros. The first time he tries it he misses just wide, with Boeser smartly providing a flash screen (a flash screen is when a screener passes briefly through the goalie’s eye line, ideally timing the flash screen to obscure the goalie’s view of the shooter’s release). When the puck comes back to him, there’s no hesitation. He’s spamming the shot, and it’s a read based on how Nashville’s penalty kill is defending.
If the Predators were in a wider diamond formation on the penalty kill, this shot wouldn’t be there. There’d be a penalty-killing forward fronting the shooting lane.
On this sequence, however, the Predators are in what’s usually called a “wedge plus-one” formation, which is far more compressed, and we know Miller recognizes that because he’s looking to get this shot off in multiple instances.
Go watch the goal again, because the level of recognition is incredible. Absolutely elite. Genius-level stuff.
As Boeser and Lindholm rotate following the Predators’ fatal failure to clear the puck, Boeser settles in right in Saros’ grill. It’s a more classic, stationary screen.
Miller is already moving to shoot as Boeser gets in position, but what Miller is really reading here is Saros. The way this shot works best is when the rival goaltender looks left around the screen, and Miller times his release perfectly. He’s quite literally, in the heat of the moment, reading Saros and anticipating that he’ll look the wrong way around Boeser, opening up that top corner. Then the finish is pitch perfect.
“Those don’t go in without him,” Miller said of Boeser’s screen. “I’m shooting about the top of the circle normally and we’ve scored on that plenty of times over the years. He’s getting really good at making the goalie, when I release it, look at his back. He’s too good to score on if he’s not there … He’s going to catch it if he sees it, it’s a great play by Brock.”
This isn’t just a sick wrist shot by a world-class sniper, although Miller is capable of overpowering even elite NHL netminders with his shot. This is a goal that’s the product of years of study and repetition and thought. A thinking man’s power-play goal.
It’s a goal helped out by years of support that Miller lent to a sometimes-hesitant teammate, helping him reinvent himself as a power-play threat and ultimately maintain a regular spot on the first power-play unit. It was an involved and not-always smooth process that the two Canucks forwards were comfortable enough now to joke about postgame:
Quinn Hughes, hits and the struggling breakout
Hughes isn’t just remarkably gifted with the puck, he’s a master at escaping heavy contact. On most nights he seems untouchable.
It doesn’t matter how ferociously a forechecker is hounding him, or how well a forward has him lined up, Hughes has an uncanny ability to spin off checks and duck big hits. One hundred seventy-five NHL defencemen have logged 2,500 minutes over the last three seasons and Hughes ranks in the top 50 in absorbing the fewest hits per 60 minutes, according to Natural Stat Trick. That matters for durability when you’re an undersized defenceman.
In Game 3, the Predators ruthlessly targeted Hughes. That’s unsurprising — teams have been chasing him relentlessly for a while and you’d expect an even brighter spotlight on Vancouver’s captain in the playoffs.
The surprise is that Nashville actually punished him. Over and over again. From the game’s first shift, Nashville’s fourth line set the tone by delivering heavy hits on Hughes and Filip Hronek, making it difficult for them to break the puck out. Colton Sissons tagged Hughes for a big hit late in the first period.
It wasn’t only that Nashville delivered bone-crushing hits. It’s that the Preds bumped and bruised him on seemingly every other shift, with Hughes struggling to get out of the way.
Hughes lacked his usual poise and escapability and struggled to make clean zone exits. He didn’t have his usually dashing rushes or gorgeous outlet passes. At one point in the game, Hughes was chased behind the net and opted to rim the puck up the wall, where another Nashville player was already waiting, instead of making a high-level controlled play like he normally would.
Hughes has tilted the ice in Vancouver’s favour by an absurd margin this season. But in Game 3, Nashville had a 16-8 edge in shot attempts and a 9-3 edge in five-on-five scoring chances during Hughes’ shifts. The Canucks’ transition game falls apart when their unstoppable one-man breakout machine all of a sudden looks human.
“I think our breakout strategy, partly we can hold up some players but I also think Huggy, there’s some things he can do so he doesn’t get hit too,” Rick Tocchet said after the game. “I think it’s a two-way street.”
Tocchet also pointed out that Nashville made adjustments to its transition game and that he wasn’t a fan of the Canucks’ neutral zone defence. He said that if they shore up their neutral zone defence, it’ll give their blueliners like Hughes more time to break the puck out on defensive zone retrievals.
Hughes is such an exceptional player that he should bounce back. He’s also not the only star player taking a beating; Roman Josi has absorbed a couple of massive hits from Nikita Zadorov over the last two games.
But Nashville got to Hughes in a way that few teams have this year. It’ll be fascinating to see how Hughes and the Canucks respond in Game 4 because he’s the engine for them to start controlling play again.
How the Canucks actually limited Nashville
Based on the flow of play and shots on goal, you’d assume that the Predators were throttling the Canucks at even strength. Nashville spent most of the game in Vancouver’s zone, dominated puck possession and had a lopsided 25-7 edge in five-on-five shots. Despite all of that, the high-danger chances were only 5-3 in Nashville’s favour at five-on-five, according to Natural Stat Trick. It’s wild that the Canucks limited the damage to just five high-danger chances against, which is a massive credit to the club’s defensive zone structure.
“That’s one of the parts of our DNA as a team is make the goalies play half the net, protect the middle,” said Miller. “When it gets loud and crazy you just do your job and stay in your structure. We don’t have to do anybody else’s job, we don’t have to go rogue and tonight, I thought we had tons of sticks in the middle of the rink.
“It’s frustrating for the other team because you want to get to the interior and playoff hockey is about denying that.”
Nashville was constantly seeking east-west passing plays to set up backdoor tap-ins but the Canucks’ defencemen broke those up. Vancouver’s big blueliners like Zadorov, Cole, Carson Soucy and Tyler Myers also did an excellent job of boxing out, winning net-front battles and blocking shots. They used their long reach whenever possible to break up the cycle down low.
Vancouver’s forwards were fully bought in too. Here’s an example of a play where Pius Suter came racing on the backcheck to break up a slot chance off the rush.
(Courtesy Sportsnet and Bik Nizzar)
The Canucks need to improve their overall play control, but it’s pivotal that they have a rock-solid defensive foundation to gut out unglamorous wins on occasion too.
Rick Tocchet’s message
Postgame we asked Tocchet about what it means to him to have some of his top-of-the-lineup stars like Miller and Boeser step up in a game like this, with Thatcher Demko out, coming off a loss in Game 2.
His answer was telling, and focused specifically on contributions other than offensive ones.
“If you look at the Conn Smythe winner last year, Jonathan Marchessault, he didn’t score the first six games,” Tocchet said. “I think when Chicago won their Cups, I think Jonathan Toews didn’t score for eight games. Star guys are going to (go through that), but if you watch them they stick with it.
“You have to have other parts of your game. So that’s our guys and they’re learning. If you’re not scoring offensively, you’ve got to make sure you’re good in other parts of your game. Then today Millsy and Brock have a good game for us.
“That’s just a lesson for our guys, whoever, that’s struggling. Make sure the other parts of your game are really good and eventually the offence will come.”
On another night in which Pettersson was mostly quiet — he had a slick setup for Nils Höglander that forced Saros to make an excellent save — it’s hard not to read between the lines and understand who Tocchet has in mind with that particular message.
(Photo of Elias Pettersson and J.T. Miller celebrating a goal during Game 3 in Nashville: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
