Vancouver Canucks Learn Lessons About Margins for Error vs. Predators in Game 5 – The Hockey Writers –

With five contests in the books of the first-round series between the Nashville Predators and Vancouver Canucks, a few trends have stood out. Number one, even though the goalies aren’t being peppered as much as they could be, they’re all coming up huge – and we mean all of them given Vancouver’s wild predicament. Two, it is virtually impossible to guess what will happen next. Just when one thinks a game will finish one way, an event erupts out of the blue that sends the match into a tizzy. That happened many times in Game 5 on Tuesday, won by the Predators 2-1 to close the series gap to 3-2. Here are the takeaways.

The Non-Challenge by Tocchet

There is little sense in burying the lede. It’s what everyone was talking about after the contest and the Canucks faced the fact that they had blown a chance to put away a dastardly, perseverant Predators side on home ice. The hot topics are Roman Josi’s power-play goal at 7:15 of the third period to level the terms 1-1 and, more critically, Canucks’ head coach Rick Tocchet‘s decision to not challenge its legality.

In his press conference afterwards, Tocchet admitted that a challenge was considered, but that he and his staff deemed their odds 50/50. As such, knowing that failure would have awarded the Predators with yet another power play, they opted out. The game hung in the balance, it appeared Nashville had scored when up a man, so not wanting to do anything to give them more momentum was fair enough.

Of course, that’s not what a lot of other people were saying online, but then again, those other people aren’t the head coach of the Canucks in a playoff game with the pressure of closing out a series in the third period of the fifth bout. 

The moment in question is very dicey. Is the play in the crease neat and clean? Not by a long shot. Josi is served a slick pass for a partial breakaway, which Arturs Silovs saves, albeit with some contact on his body. The biscuit just hangs around, not fully shielded by Silovs so the play is still alive while the goalie is lying sprawled. Gustav Nyquist smells blood and goes in to pounce on the loose puck, only to be drilled by Nikita Zadorov at the last second. As that’s happening Teddy Blueger also comes in to help. The action between Zadorov and Nyquist shoves Blueger forward and into Silovs, pushing the goalie and the puck backward, with the latter slowly sliding behind the goal line.