How Canucks crushed Ducks with franchise-record offensive outburst: 3 takeaways

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VANCOUVER — The Vancouver Canucks started the game slowly Saturday afternoon against the Anaheim Ducks. The Ducks racked up consecutive heavy shifts after the puck dropped in the first period and put enough pressure on Vancouver that the Canucks conceded the game-opening goal on the second shift when Troy Terry walked unencumbered into the slot and beat Thatcher Demko clean with a glove-side high wrist shot.

The Ducks’ lead was short-lived, however. And when Vancouver took the lead midway through the first frame, it didn’t look back. In fact, the Canucks scored a historic run of goals — five across 4 1/2 minutes of play — to completely flatten Anaheim in a 6-2 win.

It wasn’t a win that will mean much in the big picture — the Canucks are too far back of the Western Conference playoff bar at this point.

It wasn’t a victory in an especially hard-fought game. Given the low stakes for both sides, Saturday afternoon’s contest at Rogers Arena was played at a pace somewhere between what you’d expect to find in the NHL preseason and at the NHL All-Star game.

We won’t let that obscure what was a good time out at the rink for Canucks fans on Saturday. For a team that hasn’t won too often at home this season and has struggled desperately to manufacture goals and excitement in front of their paying customers, putting on a good show matters.

Elias Pettersson gets his first

With the Canucks trailing in the first period, first-year defender Elias Pettersson got Vancouver on the board with his first career goal.

The other Elias Pettersson has scored his first NHL goal and it was a beauty 🚨 pic.twitter.com/Qqm5OSFAWo

— Rob Williams (@RobTheHockeyGuy) April 5, 2025

The goal itself was quite lovely, as Pettersson combined nicely with Vancouver’s fourth line off the rush, took fourth-man’s ice and finished neatly past Lukáš Dostál when he wired a great Linus Karlsson feed home.

Obviously goal scoring isn’t going to be Pettersson’s calling card as an NHL player. It’s his speed, physicality and authoritative two-way intelligence that’s been so impressive over the course of this season. That it’s somewhat surprising that it took Pettersson so long to find the back of the net, however, given the quality of some of the scoring chances he’s put himself in position to take, is probably a solid indicator of the depth of his skill set.

Pettersson isn’t going to be a first power-play unit quarterback or anything, but there’s some skill and positional offensive intelligence built into his game. He’s certainly not tracking to be the sort of defensive defender that only scores a goal or two a year. This is a young player whose game certainly appears to be more multi-dimensional than that.

The onslaught

Once Pettersson broke the duck, Vancouver just ran roughshod over the Ducks.

First it was a fortunate bouncing Filip Hronek point shot that eluded Dostal just 68 seconds after the Pettersson goal.

Then Boeser deflected home a Quinn Hughes slap pass on the power play, less than a minute later. A couple of minutes passed when Hughes sent a rush feed to Conor Garland that bounced to the feet of the Canucks forward in the blue paint, for the tap-in goal.

Finally, to set a franchise record, Dakota Joshua off of a broken passing play with Kiefer Sherwood and Marcus Pettersson.

The onslaught was wildly dramatic and ended any suspense in this game early. It also flipped, in the blink of an eye, what had been a flat Vancouver start into a dominant first period for the record books.

As for the Ducks, as much as they’ve improved year-over-year and as much promising young talent as they have at just about every level of their lineup, it’s pretty obvious that the apparent progress their team has made this season is skin deep and superficial.

The truth is, the Ducks should’ve improved by an awful lot more than 20 points this season. Poor vibes, poor in-game decision making by Ducks coaches staff and a far too conservative tactical approach have held back a team that had the talent to take a quantum leap forward this season, and instead took a baby step.

The onslaught was another example of it. Dostal has started 17 of Anaheim’s last 20 games played, and it was evident early that he didn’t have it. The Ducks, however, kept him in net, refusing to give him a mercy pull as the game tilted away from the Ducks in rapid fashion.

Compounding that absurdity, Ducks head coach Greg Cronin didn’t call a timeout until after Vancouver scored their fifth goal in a four-and-a-half-minute stretch. At that point, the score was 5-1 and the game was effectively done.

If you’re going to burn a timeout to try and stem the momentum in a game, you might want to consider utilizing it before the score gets truly crooked. Or before you’re on the other end of a “fastest five goals in franchise history” type stretch.

The Abbotsford playoff preview

Playing in his first game since late January, Max Sasson was put on a line with Linus Karlsson and Jonathan Lekkerimäki on Saturday afternoon. With his forward ranks depleted by injuries — Vancouver had multiple players in the lineup who have been recalled “under emergency conditions” — Rick Tocchet turned to that forward line, in part, because it’s a trio that’s spent a fair bit of time skating together with Abbotsford in the American League.

And the results on Saturday were pretty good. A pair of five-on-five goals, including a lovely finish on a third-period goal for Sasson:

Max Sasson connects on the breakaway! 🚨 pic.twitter.com/TWNb1Rffht

— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) April 5, 2025

Between the performance of that line and Pettersson’s first career goal, in some ways the lopsided Vancouver victory on Saturday offered up a preview for Abbotsford’s playoff run, which will get started in earnest later this month.

(Photo: Anne-Marie Sorvin / Imagn Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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