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I Watched This Game: Canucks hit Hughes with boos and bodies, but lose tenth straight

Daniel Wagner
Daniel Wagner
|
Oct 26 2026, 8:51 am
I Watched This Game: Canucks hit Hughes with boos and bodies, but lose tenth straight
Bob Frid/Imagn Images

For twenty minutes, the Vancouver Canucks actually looked like they were better than the Minnesota Wild — or at least as good as them.

The first period on Sunday night was arguably the best period of the season for the Canucks, as they outshot the Wild 10-to-5, imposed their physicality with some big hits, and controlled puck possession in the offensive zone for long stretches.

“We just had the right mindset,” said Brock Boeser. “We were being physical, and you could see them turning the puck over, and we were shooting the puck. That’s the way we need to play each and every period.”

The Rogers Arena crowd, primed to boo the returning Quinn Hughes every time he touched the puck, cheered lustily as the Canucks tagged Hughes with a couple of hits — not the easiest thing to do — and roared at every scoring chance.

Fans hit the former Canucks captain with a few different chants, like “Quinn Hughes sucks,” “Quitter,” “One-year rental,” and a dig at his new team: “He’s not signing.”

“The crowd was amazing tonight,” said Luke Schenn. “The first period was as loud as we’ve heard it all year, for sure.”

And yet, the Canucks still went into the first intermission down one-nothing.

There’s a saying that hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. Unfortunately, the Wild had both the talent and the hard work on Sunday night.

The Canucks brought the effort and the mindset to start the game, but it was clear that the Wild, who sit first in the ultra-competitive Central Division, are just a better, more skilled team. The Wild withstood the best the Canucks could offer, counterpunched on the power play, then took over the game.

“I mean, it was a great first 20 minutes,” said Schenn. “Second period, they took it to us and probably outworked us. We had a hard time getting out of our own end, and we were sort of feeding their transition with some turnovers.”

The Canucks showed some life late in the third period with a couple of goals and a strong push at 6-on-5 with their net empty, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough to avoid losing their tenth-straight game.

They’re now in danger of matching their franchise record for longest losing streak, set just last season when they lost 11 straight games from Dec. 30 to Jan. 19. The Canucks are now miles away from the positive vibes they felt at the beginning of the season, and it has the Canucks’ coaching staff flummoxed.

“I think everything but the score was a positive for us coming out of the first, and then we weren’t able to maintain that in the second,” said head coach Manny Malhotra. “We’re searching for answers. It’s concerning.

“I feel like we have a good period, we have an understanding as to why we had a good period, and then as soon as we come off of the things that we discuss in being physical and being aggressive and winning puck battles and we allow a transition team to come to life, they did what we expected them to do. It’s frustrating when there’s things in place that work well for us, and when we do them, we look good. And then, for some reason, we come off them.”

As someone who is forever forgetting to do things that lead to good outcomes, like drinking lots of water, eating vegetables, and excercising regularly, I heavily related to the Canucks when I watched this game.

offside i watched this game

Hits and boos for Quintin Hughes

  • Set aside the question of whether Hughes deserved boos in his return to Vancouver. Instead, consider it a bonding experience for Canucks fans, who can’t expect wins to bring them together this season. At a time when society is particularly divided, just let people come together in a little harmless hate.
  • The booing of Hughes was relentless. The boos started right from when he took the ice for warm-ups, continued when he came out for the start of the game, and even popped up for the brief moment the scoreboard showed Hughes during “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
  • The boos kept going every time Hughes had the puck, which was essentially all the time, because Hughes always has the puck. The first time Hughes touched the puck, however, the boos quickly turned to cheers, because Elias Pettersson cut off his path behind the net, forcing Hughes to stop short, where he got tagged with a solid hit from Drew O’Connor.

  • It’s not easy to hit Hughes, who is one of the most elusive skaters in the NHL, as Canucks fans are well aware. So, it was notable that Max Sasson got a piece of Hughes later in the first, again to an eruption of cheers from the Canucks faithful. It’s no coincidence that two of the Canucks’ fastest skaters were the ones to get their licks in on Hughes.

  • The boos for Hughes didn’t exactly stop during the (rather milquetoast) tribute video at the first commercial break, but they were mixed with cheers and applause. Hughes got a partial standing ovation, which we could call a “Standing U” because it’s not a complete “Standing O.”

“I don’t even know what our percentage is right now, but it’s not pretty”

  • The Canucks controlled play early on, but like a keyboard missing shift and caps lock keys, they couldn’t capitalize. Liam Öhgren set up Zeev Buium for one of the Canucks’ best early chances, and it would have been nearly as poetic as The Phantom Menace if those two pieces of the Hughes return had combined for a goal, but it was not to be.

  • The Canucks’ biggest weakness remains the penalty kill, which is last in the league at a woeful 64.4 per cent, and it led to the opening goal. Defenceman Elias Pettersson got caught too high up as the bottom of the penalty-killing diamond, ending up on the wrong side of Maxim Shabanov as he tapped in a feed from Kirill Kaprizov.
  • “I don’t even know what our percentage is right now, but it’s not pretty,” said Schenn. “Whether it’s a breakdown, or not blocking a shot, or losing a battle, or sometimes we’re just getting picked apart on seams — it’s hard to point to one thing, for sure. But all in all, it’s not even close.”

“Lack of consistency in our effort”

  • The Canucks had ten shots in the first period — a season-high for shots in a period, even if that is a very low bar. Unfortunately, they followed that up with just three shots in the second period and five in the third. That is an insufficient number of shots for a single LMFAO chorus, let alone a hockey game where you’re trying to come back from a first-period deficit.
  • “It’s related to that lack of consistency in our effort,” said Malhotra when asked about the lack of shots. “When we were direct in the first period, and we were applying pressure in the O-zone, obviously you create looks. Number one, you’re able to get pucks back to be able to shoot the puck. When you come off of those things, and you’re not applying the same pressure, you don’t get the same looks.”
  • The Wild made it 2-0 when Filip Chytil bobbled an unexpected pass from Jonathan Lekkerimäki when the young winger really ought to have made sure to get the puck out over the blue line at the end of a long shift stuck in the defensive zone. Bobby Brink deked right around Leevi Meriläinen and tucked the puck in with a gentle kiss on the forehead.

  • Midway through the second, the Wild power play struck again to make it 3-0. Hughes gained the zone with some fancy footwork, then stayed in deep, looping behind the Canucks net to the backdoor, where the puck found him out of a conglomeration of unmoving Canucks feet. To run salt into the wound, it was Hughes’ 500th career point.
  • “It’s a number of things,” said Malhotra when asked how to fix the penalty kill. “It’s structurally, being better on our triggers and knowing when to go, doing a better job with our sticks in lanes, killing passing lanes, and just the ability to clear pucks. We have to value anytime we have an opportunity to touch it, it has to get down the ice.”

“We haven’t played with each other for a while”

  • Early in the third, Hughes hammered the final nail in the coffin of this game when he took advantage of a bad line change to spring Kaprizov for a breakaway. Buium got pulled out of the middle tracking his check to the boards, and Tom Willander had barely stepped on the ice when Kaprizov burst over the blue line and walked around Meriläinen like he was the Seawall.
  • Filip Hronek hasn’t been great — or even good — this season, but he did manage to spring Max Sasson for a breakaway to get the Canucks on the board. The pass was nearly picked off, but Sasson managed to snag the deflected puck before sneaking it five-hole on Calvin “Jean-Luc” Pickard.

  • You can’t say that Canucks fans lack a sense of humour. After Sasson’s goal reduced the Wild lead to three, Rogers Arena erupted in a “We want the Cup” chant before adjusting to a slightly more realistic goal of “Landon Dupont.”
  • Malhotra put Elias Pettersson and Brock Boeser on a line together and challenged them to lead by example — a noteworthy challenge after Boeser called out his teammates after their last game. For most of the game, they did not rise to that challenge, as that duo was badly outshot when they were on the ice. In fairness, they were hard-matched against Hughes and the Wild’s top forward line, which is one of the best lines in hockey.
  • Late in the third, however, Pettersson and Boeser combined on a fantastic goal. The two gained the offensive zone, then passed the puck around Hughes like they were playing piggy-in-the-middle before Pettersson set up a Boeser one-timer from the high slot.

  • “Just made a nice clean breakout there and we had some good separation — good line rush there — he made a great play on turning up and finding me in the slot,” said Boeser. “We’re just trying to find that chemistry again and get it going. We haven’t played with each other for a while.”
  • The Canucks managed to go more than two minutes with an empty net behind them without giving up a goal. They didn’t score a goal either, but every journey begins with a single step.
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