Updates
Referee Carter Sandlak will be in Vancouver tonight, where his dad, Jim, played nine seasons with the @Canucks. Sandlak will be working alongside ref Garrett Rank for #DETvsVAN. Tonight’s crew: https://t.co/Hat3kj85Z3 #DETvsVAN #LGRW #Canucks @DetroitRedWings @Canucks pic.twitter.com/IxknoRanEU
— Scouting The Refs (@ScoutingTheRefs) February 13, 2023
The @Canucks put G Spencer Martin on waivers for the purpose of assignment to Abbotsford in the AHL. Martin has lost 10 straight appearances, giving up at least three goals in each game.
— Greg Wyshynski (@wyshynski) February 13, 2023
Red Wings Lines
Tyler Bertuzzi – Dylan Larkin – Dominik Kubalik
Michael Rasmussen – Andrew Copp – Robby Fabbri
Jonatan Berggren – Joe Veleno – David Perron
Filip Zadina – Pius Suter – Oskar Sundqvist
Ben Chiarot – Mortiz Seider
Olli Maatta – Filip Hronek
Robert Hagg – Jordan Oesterle
Ville Husso
Magnus Hellberg
Canucks Lines
Anthony Beauvillier – Elias Pettersson – Brock Boeser
Vasily Podkolzin – J.T. Miller – Conor Garland
Dakota Joshua – Sheldon Dries – Andrei Kuzmenko
Phil Di Giuseppe – Nils Aman – Curtis Lazar
Quinn Hughes – Ethan Bear
Oliver Ekman Larsson – Luke Schenn
Riley Stillman – Tyler Myers
Spencer Martin
Colin Delia
Three Keys to the Game
Start quickly again. On Saturday, the first period was the only period in which the Wings won the possession battle. Probably something to do with it being a matinee game and for the Vancouver squad it must have felt like playing at 9 AM. We are going in the other extreme with this matchup; it’s going to feel like late at night for the Wings and prime time for the Canucks. Maybe score goals and win the period again despite the time?
Better defense in the third period. Vancouver charged hard early in the third on Saturday thanks to scoring effects, that Mario-Kart-zipper-esque phenomenon where the losing team starts playing harder and more desperate late in the game. It was looking like they were going to get things tied up until Hronek scored Detroit’s fourth goal of the night. Husso still faced a lot of heat, but Detroit needs to do better at forcing pucks out and winning board battles down low to give Ville a break.
Hat trick! We were close to two of them last night! Larkin and Berggren each had two goals on Saturday and you could nearly taste the curly fries satisfaction of seeing all those hats on the ice. I mean, this isn’t so much as a “key” as it would just be fun, but I want to have fun. There aren’t a whole lot of keys left for me to write.
UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, A, B, START! BONUS KEY UNLOCKED! As cool as a hat trick would be, you know what would be even cooler? If like, there were bumper cars and they also had a cannon on the back that fired dodge balls, sort of like Mario Kart Double Dash, because Mario Kart is a consistent theme of today’s keys to the game, and Larkin and Seider drive the Red Wings bumper car against the Canucks bumper car, piloted by Pettersson and Quinn Hughes, and Brock Boeser is tied up by a dangling rope, suspended over a Jaws-style animatronic orca coming out of center ice, and Boeser is slowly descending, and the Wild (Kaprizov/Brodin), Flames (Kadri/Lucic), and Devils (Tatar/B. Smith, lol) also get their own carts and whoever is the last team to still have a drivable cart gets Brock Boeser for a bag of pucks, unless he’s eaten by the animatronic orca first.
Does this sound dumb? It’s super dumb. Like, 100% idiotic, but also I went on a ride at Disney World once that was basically this, and in light of WiiM’s uncertainty I suppose I’m drawn to such happy memories and occasionally I go off on a Scrubs-style mental tangent, which isn’t a bad thing, friends. (Well, maybe bad for you. You have to read this crap. I don’t. I just write it.) But those silly tangents are something this community has always put up with and even sometimes understood, which is a miracle. Seriously, pat yourselves on the back if you ever read one of my recaps beginning to end for a 7-1 blowout loss.
Also in all seriousness, I want to give a huge shoutout to my buddy, Rob. He’s a diehard Canucks fan and a born-and-bred Vancouverite, and this GDU is the last article I’ll write about the Canucks for WiiM. He really helped me become a fan of the whole game and league and not just the Wings. If I could go back and change the outcome of one non-Red Wings game, it’d be game 7 in the 2011 finals. And Rob, if you could change something, you would have a hard time picking between all of my several uber charges you wasted in TF2 while explaining to me that a 2-way contract in reality works nothing like it does in video games. I wouldn’t have been able to become a blogger without those conversations. Thanks, man.
