Gallagher: Canucks' slow start costing them dearly

The Vancouver Canucks have started every game three of these playoffs much the same way a sloth begins his day at the top of a tall tree, relaxed and not moving very much.

In both Chicago and Nashville they managed to recover from these appalling starts by getting some great goaltending and then scoring on their chances when the team got their legs going and generated some.

Not this time. No to the goaltending early at least and no to the scoring on their chances until leaving it just a little too late. Not against a team that has more firepower than the Predators have ever had in their franchise history, the San Jose Sharks clearly a lot better team than the previous two opponents. This time the Canucks not only lost the game, they lost perhaps their most consistent defenceman all season in Christian Ehrhoff in a shoulder to shoulder hit by Jamie McGinn in the bargain, this team not reacting well to whatever the coaching staff is telling them before their first road appearance in any series. Aaron Rome went down later too of course, but that happened once Vancouver woke up.

“You can get away with playing bad if you don't take penalties but that's what we did tonight,” said Daniel Sedin as if kind of expecting the slow legs to start. “We were okay five-on-five and we got back into it. The bottom line is we had to score on the 5-on-3 and didn't.”

Yes, they did almost pull off another comeback. But one would have expected there to have been an improvement in this pattern of slow road starts given the experience of the previous two games and the fact that this time they didn't have to change time zones. But if anything their paralytic beginning was worse than ever. Plodding around like they had 20 pound weights on each leg, all the speed advantage the Canucks had shown in the first two games of this series was replaced by what Todd McLellan had referred to as 'chasing cars' when his team was in the same boat.

Just why this happens on such a regular basis to this team isn't clear but the bottom line has always resulted in a long series and this looks to be no exception, as even when Vancouver did get their scoring chances a plenty in the second period as they usually do, they came up blanks making Antti Niemi look like the goaltender who has won six straight playoff series. The third period was great, but too little too late in the ultimate analysis.

The start or lack thereof overshadowed the hilarious penalty kill the Canucks have iced in this series, a problem that hadn't hurt them until it was time for the officials to balance the power play books a little. And when the Sharks got their opportunities with the man advantage, they poured in the goals to the point where they're six for 13 in the series replaying Vancouver's laughable effort against LA last year.

Somewhere Manny Malhotra is working even harder to make it back before this is all over.

“This isn't the Nashville Predators power play we're facing now,” said Jannik Hansen. “When you give a team eight, nine, 10 chances like we did tonight, whatever it was (10), that makes it too hard to kill anything. We've got to limit the chances we're giving this team if we're gonna be better.”

“It all seems to be happening late in the penalty,” said Kevin Bieksa, “it's not like they're scoring right away. We're getting the first part handled and then give it up later. We just have to sustain what we're doing earlier. But it's definitely something we'll look at tomorrow and see what we have to do to improve.”

For his part Alain Vigneault was not wanting to point at the officials for fear of a fine, but then that's pretty much what he did anyway in explaining how the shots reached 15-1 in the dismal first period. He insisted 'all the shots came on the power play.'

“We got 10 penalties and I thought we were pretty disciplined,” said Vigneault. “I'd get a pretty big fine if I said what I thought.”

“We haven't complained about officiating all year and we're not going to start now,” said Daniel Sedin. “We've just got to find a way to stay out of the box and make it a better start next game.”

While many of the Canucks including Bieksa insisted the Canucks were the better team 5-on-5 but how they would know is not really clear. There were so many penalties including majors and a double minor that the amount of even strength time was so little and so fractured it was hard to get a feel for who had the upper hand.

But when the game was really decided early on, the Canucks were chasing. And in the end, they didn't catch anyone