Canucks: Secondary Scoring Pointless if Primary Scorers Are Point-less

For a team that many at the start of the season considered a threat for top-spot in the West, saying the Vancouver Canucks have been disappointing this year is quite an understatement.

As the population of the team’s bandwagon continues to spike and slump day-by-day, many are asking: What has happened to these guys?

They looked so promising earlier in the year, at one point holding the fourth best record in the entire NHL, and this was without much of their defensive core. The Sedin’s were great, Naslund was proving everyone’s doubts wrong and Luongo was, well, Luongo.

The only thing the team lacked was secondary scoring, which is a problem for many NHL teams that are trying to transfer over from mediocre to elite.

This issue has been all but erased in the past few weeks, as four guys who have worn their hearts on their sleeves the whole season are finally starting to get paid off.

In the past eleven games, Ryan Kesler has five goals. Alex Burrows has three goals and eight points. Raymond and Shannon have combined for seven goals and thirteen points in this same period of time. That all combines for fifteen goals in eleven games, and if that’s not good secondary scoring, I don’t know what is.

So now that they got help from the lower lines, what exactly has happened to the Canucks?

Primary scoring has disappeared, that’s what.

In this outstanding eleven game showing of what these second and third liners are capable of, Daniel Sedin (the teams leading goal-scorer) hasn’t rippled the mesh once. Naslund hasn’t scored in seventeen matches, and has just one assist for his efforts (or lack there-of). Henrik Sedin is the only one of these three that has scored, but don’t get your hopes up: it was an empty netter.

On top of all this, our world-class goaltender has become one of the streakiest in the league ever since the All-Star break.

So, do the Canucks have what it takes to make a run this year?

Sure they do.

They just need all the pieces of the puzzle to be present at once. Secondary scoring is all but useless if the primary finish isn’t there, so unless the Sedins break out of the slump soon, the future of this season looks pretty bleak.

With Luongo struggling to find consistency as of late, it is up to the top-line to take some notes on what the rest of the squad is doing. Steal a game for Roberto for once this season, and I guarantee he will respond with nothing but perfection from that point on.