With the team unable so far to put together a winning streak of more than three games, playoff hopes may already be fading

As the entire hockey world has seen over the first two months of the National Hockey League season, the Vancouver Canucks can’t score goals. In many ways it’s a credit to them that despite their offensive woes, they won as many games as they lost (13–13–1) through the first 27 games of the year. But .500 hockey won’t cut it if the Canucks are planning to get back to the playoffs.

To get where the Canucks need to be (likely in the 92-to-94 ­- ­point range by the end of the season), they’ll have to start stringing some wins together. Already this year, the teams they’re battling for playoff spots in the West have shown an ability to get on a run: Detroit won nine in a row, Calgary and Minnesota each won six straight, while Edmonton, Dallas, and Nashville have all posted five-game win streaks. At some point, the Canucks are going to have to do the same.

The problem is that the Canucks have continually shown how tough it is to win on any night when they manage only a goal or two. They’re fooling themselves if they think that they can grind out four or five or six straight wins to make some headway in the Northwest Division and Western Conference playing the way they are.

“Here’s the thing: right now we’re having trouble scoring goals. That’s no secret,” concedes Trevor Linden, who is among the many Canucks caught in a goal-scoring funk, with one goal in the first 27 games. “We’re playing as stingy as we can defensively and grinding out 1–0 and 2–1 wins, and that is a difficult way to play. But if we can continue to play that stingy defence and that hard hockey when we do start scoring, hopefully our game comes around, and when that does happen, we’ll be a pretty good team because we’ve got a good foundation. But until that happens, we’re going to have to grind hard, and that’s playoff-style hockey and we just have to make sure we’re in there every night.”

Through the first two months of the season, the best run the Canucks managed to get on was a modest three-game win streak that included victories over terrible teams like St. Louis and Chicago. Unless the “one step forward, two steps back, two steps forward, one step back” pattern the Canucks have demonstrated so far this year changes, they’re going to be spinning their wheels all season.

Obviously, they can’t win games if they don’t score goals, and based on what they’ve shown so far, the notion of any lengthy win streak seems far-fetched. Still, the players cling to the belief that the goals will come and the wins will come with them.

“Yeah, it’s a challenge [to get on a roll], but every game is tough,” says winger Taylor Pyatt, who showed some early finish while playing with Daniel and Henrik Sedin but has since gone cold like the rest of his teammates. “When you’re not scoring, it’s not easy; it’s a struggle every game, and we know that we can’t make many mistakes defensively right now. We’ve got to play pretty tight, and hopefully we can get more goals.”

Hope seems to be about all the Canucks have as comfort these days. The longer the goal-scoring struggles continue, the more pressure they place on the defence and goalie Roberto Luongo. Right now, the Canucks are doing all they can to suffocate their opponents and win the low-scoring games. But as those low-scoring games move along and the Canucks can’t find the back of the net, you see players gamble in an attempt to generate offence, and far too often this season, those high-risk manoeuvres have resulted in goals or scoring chances for the other team.

“All teams go through this at some phase in the season,” says head coach Alain Vigneault, who probably should have realized he had a goal-scoring quandary on his hands back in training camp when he watched these same players plug their way through a 1–0 scrimmage. “Usually the phase is a little bit shorter than ours and you get out of it and things equal out. We’re being challenged a little bit more and I’m confident—I’m telling myself I’m confident—that when we come out of it we’re going to be stronger and we’re going to get on a tear.”

Vigneault has to believe it because that is his job, but so far there’s no evidence to support his contention. On each of the four occasions in the first 27 games that the Canucks managed to score four goals in a game, they followed it up by scoring two goals or fewer. The players keep talking about how all they need is a break here or some good luck there and they’ll find the magic formula, but that hasn’t happened yet. And two months of any season give a pretty good indication of what any hockey team is made of, so it’s highly unlikely that this team will suddenly bust out of its scoring slump and never look back.

“We have to score more goals eventually to be successful, there’s no doubt about it,” says Markus Naslund, who after a slow start has picked up his production but hasn’t been able to ignite the rest of his club.

So for the time being, at least, it appears the Canucks will continue to plod along, picking up a win here and a win there and doing all they can to stay with the pack of teams fighting for postseason positions. But the longer they go without getting on a roll, the tougher the task will be in the long run. Because no matter how well the Canucks play defensively, if they don’t start putting the puck in the net themselves, they’re going to run into opponents who do know how to score. And the task of trying to win a bunch of those close-checking, chess match–type games in a row seems too much to ask of this group.

Jeff Paterson is a sportscaster and talk-show host on Vancouver’s all-sports radio, Team 1040. E-mail him at jeff.paterson@team1040.ca