Canucks 3, Wild 1: A night for Kevin Lankinen

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We’ll ask it again, for the umpteenth time: where would the Vancouver Canucks be without Kevin Lankinen?

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The Finn has been stellar so many times this season and he was once again Friday night.

The Canucks won because of him. Open and shut case.

He made 35 saves, many truly spectacular, giving his team a chance to win.

And the Canucks, in the end, did enough to grab a 3-1 win.

They’ll need to get more than 20 shots on goal in future games because they can’t be leaning on their goalie like this every night, but they’ll take this win, no doubt.

So, uh, is this the Petey redemption arc?

Shoot the puck, everyone has been urging Elias Petey Pettersson.

And he did that with abandon on Friday.

He scored a vintage power play goal, which is news enough in itself, but he also had six shot attempts on the night, which used to be a regular feature of his game.

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He may think of himself as a pass-first player, but he’s always found ways to get shots, too. He hasn’t scored 182 career goals by accident.

Let us hope that this is the beginning of the rest of his season.

Get ’em moving

The Canucks’ penalty kill has been in incredible form since the trade of J.T. Miller.

They’d given up just one goal before Friday.

The Wild finally burst the bubble in the third and it was pretty much how Matt Boldy predicted it would need to happen: make the Canucks scramble.

Now, some of this story is because Kiefer Sherwood ended up stickless, but either way there was a gap in the Canucks’ defence and Minnesota took advantage.

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