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I Watched This Game: Ben Hutton’s big hit lone highlight in another Canucks loss

Canucks 1, Capitals 3
Daniel Wagner
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Canucks fans have learned to accept little victories in the midst of the team’s brutal losing skid. With losses now in 13 of 15 games since Bo Horvat got injured, fans need to enjoy the little things. They’re not moral victories, exactly, but they numb the pain.

Most of the time, those little victories are Brock Boeser goals, or sometimes assists. Boeser represents the Canucks’ only hope for some hardware at the end of the season, as he’s currently a frontrunner for the Calder Trophy as Rookie of the Year. Though I suppose Derek Dorsett has a shot at the Masterton.

There was a little victory in this large-ish defeat, but this one wasn’t a goal or an assist, and it had nothing to do with Boeser. Instead, this little victory was a big hit by an unlikely candidate: Ben Hutton.

Hutton’s hit made it all worthwhile when I watched this game.

  • I want to talk about Hutton’s hit some more because it was great and the rest of the game was mostly depressing.
  • The hit was on Brooks Orpik, who is 6’3” and 217 lbs. He’s a big dude. But then I looked up Ben Hutton to see the height and weight difference and realized he is 6’2” and 207 lbs! He is also a large lad! And then I looked up the average height and weight of an NHL defenceman and realized Hutton is pretty much right at the average. Huh.
  • Hutton dropped Orpik hard, immediately after Orpik took the shot. It’s best viewed on the replay, where Sportsnet slowed it down a little and you can truly appreciate the impact. Orpik ended up completely horizontal a good foot-and-a-half off the ice, then came crashing down. It’s like a little Wile E. Coyote cartoon with Hutton as a more violent Roadrunner.

  • Part of the reason the hit is so great is because of who delivered it. Hutton is a bit of a goofball, who always seems to be smiling. He also has a tendency towards what some might call “soft” play in the defensive zone, preferring to use his stick to break up plays instead of taking the body. Combine his personality and his style of play and some people don’t take him seriously, even if his on-ice results suggest he’s very effective with the right partner. If he can add a physical edge, while maintaining the other strong elements of his game, he won’t be a healthy scratch again anytime soon.
  • Hutton has now provided the two biggest hits of the Canucks season, both in the last five games. The first hit came on Dustin Brown, which is only available on the internet in Punjabi. That was another clean, open-ice hit that sent a big player flying and I am here for it.
  • I feel like this reawakened a love for big hits that has lain dormant for awhile. Growing up, I always loved physical hockey — a steady diet of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em videos will do that to you — but some of the lustre was taken out of it with all of the concussion concerns, but a big, clean hit like this is everything that I love about hits in hockey. He blew him up without scrambling his brain and it was great!
  • A bunch of Capitals fans and bloggers viewed the hit as dirty for some reason, and I will not allow my enjoyment of that hit to be sullied. Was it a late hit? No: it came right after Orpik released the puck. Was it from the blind side? No: Hutton hit him square in the chest. Was it high? No: Orpik’s head was never a point of contact. Was it an elbow? No: Hutton kept his elbow tucked into his body and hit with his shoulder. Was it a dangerous distance from the boards? No: Orpik did end up sliding into the boards, but he had plenty of time to brace himself and did not go into the boards in a dangerous way. What’s the problem?

 

 

  • Hutton’s big hit didn’t come until early in the third period. By that time, the Canucks were already down 3-1 and were being so soundly outplayed that they had little hope of making a comeback, but after the hit, they had a pretty solid third period in which they out-shot the Capitals 20-7. Coincidence? Correlation? Causation? Condensation? Score effects? It’s hard to say, but the fact the Canucks got a power play after the hit didn’t hurt.
  • Why did the Canucks get a power play? Because, as is now tradition after a clean hit, Hutton was challenged to a fight with Devante Smith-Pelly, who got an instigator penalty. Hutton held his own, but I wish he didn’t have to. I love the physicality of a big hit; I no longer love the physicality of a pointless fight.
  • Okay, that’s probably enough bullet points about one hit that was ultimate inconsequential to the result of the game, even if I liked it a whole bunch. I guess I can write about the rest of the game.
  • It was confusing to hear “Djoos” throughout this game. Kept thinking Kevin “Juice” Bieksa was on the ice. Instead it was Capitals defenceman Christian Djoos, better known in some parts as Holy Water.
  • The Canucks opened the scoring in this one, raising fans’ hopes before dashing them on the rocks with a twist of lemon. This goal, like so many other power play goals before it, was all Brock Boeser, even if he didn’t score it or get an assist on it. At this point, Boeser can make goals happen without even touching the puck. He’s that good.
  • It was a Boeser backcheck on a Tom Wilson shorthanded breakaway that indirectly caused the Capitals to take a too many men on the ice call, because Wilson was so shaken by the effectiveness of the backcheck that he took too long to get back to the bench. On the ensuing 5-on-3, Boeser took a penalty killer out of the play simply by raising his stick for a potential one-timer. He’s like a true Jedi master, who doesn’t even need to use a lightsaber, which is his shot in this metaphor.
  • You would think this would be an occasion for Alex Edler to load up his slap shot, given how much time and space Boeser gave him. Instead, he flicked a wrist shot that was really a pass to Daniel Sedin, who was parked in front like an Uber driver, and Daniel tipped it like an Uber passenger.
  • Then things got silly. Nicklas Backstrom elbowed Nic Dowd behind the net, which caused Dowd to knock the net onto Jacob Markstrom. Michael Del Zotto turned his back on the play to help his goaltender, helpfully putting the net back in place in time for the puck to go in. If he hadn’t caught the net and pushed it back, it would have fallen and no goal would have been scored. Take a tip from Elsa, Del Zotto: let it go.
  • Apologies to any parents who got PTSD from me even mentioning that song.
  • Two of the three Capitals goals were just weird and unlucky for Jacob Markstrom, but he whiffed pretty badly on the Capitals’ second goal. Lars Eller shot it between Hutton’s legs, which provided a partial screen, but Markstrom looked smaller in the net than Nemo and he missed the puck with his glove. Perhaps Hutton could have closed the gap better, but that’s the kind of shot that should be stopped.
  • Markstrom couldn’t do anything about the third goal, though. He made the initial save on John Carlson, but then Erik Gudbranson swatted at the puck in an attempt to clear it and instead sent it off Markstrom’s shoulder and in. But if any NHL GMs are reading this, Gudbranson made a great defensive play and it wasn’t his fault at all.
  • Travis Green is really married to the idea of having a shutdown matchup line and, with Brandon Sutter still out, he’s turned to Nic Dowd to centre it. It’s not working too well. Guess which Canucks forward has been on the ice for the highest rate of shot attempts against? Wrong, it’s Sam Gagner. But Dowd is fourth, which is still not very good.
  • I’m not a huge fan of scratching Derrick Pouliot, but Alex Biega was pretty good in this game, and who else are you going to scratch: Michael Del Zotto or Erik Gudbranson? That’s crazy talk!