The Vancouver Canucks dropped a 2-1 decision to the Vegas Golden Knights. In all honesty, according to the eye test and the numbers, they probably deserved to lose by more<\/a>. Without an excellent goaltending performance by Nikita Tolopilo, the scoreboard would\u2019ve gotten pretty darn ugly, with the underlying numbers not at all fun to look at from this one.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the loss, by the numbers.<\/p>\n Game Flow It was almost comedic how one-sided this game was. There was only one period where the Canucks were over 40.00 CF%, and that was the second, with a meagre 40.54 CF% to their name. The rest of the time, Vancouver was hovering around 30.00 CF%, posting a 32.35 CF% in the first and 31.82 CF% in the third. Naturally, possession numbers like those don\u2019t lend very kindly to the expected goals margins that a team would want when trying to win games, and of course, the Canucks\u2019 were not good at all. They had a 13.86 xGF% in the first, 39.35 xGF% in the second, and 22.84 xGF% in the third, all the while getting out-chanced heavily through each and every category across every period. Again, it\u2019s a suprise that this game finished 2-1, and even more surprising that the Canucks managed to strike first with how bad the numbers were.<\/p>\n Heat Map The heat map is a pretty good visualization of how bad things were going for the Canucks last night. Yes, they were outshot 28-11, which isn\u2019t ideal no matter how you cut it, but the 5v5 scoring chances were also not pretty as well. They were doubled up on by the Golden Knights by a 28-14 margin, and were tripled up on in high-danger chances at 13-4. It\u2019s just not good hockey at both ends of the ice, and while you could argue that Vegas should\u2019ve made Vancouver pay more, the numbers relative to each other simply were not good enough from the Canucks perspective.<\/p>\n Individual Advanced Stats<\/p>\n Corsi Champ:\u00a0Elias Pettersson was at least trying to make a difference here. Leading the Canucks with a 48.00 CF%, his Corsi number was a 17.12 CF% rel to team average to show just how rough it was for the entire team as a whole. To give more context to this though, Pettersson was going head to head against Eichel\u2019s line the entire time, so the fact that he paced the Canucks in Corsi shouldn\u2019t be taken lightly, especially in a game where they were statistically dominated.<\/p>\n After breaking his 20-goal drought with a 2-goal game against FLA, Pettersson finds himself in another goalless slump. He\u2019s without a goal in nine straight. 20 minutes away from making it 10 games. #Canucks<\/a><\/p>\n How did Pettersson not score this?<\/p>\n \ud83c\udfa5 Sportsnet | #Canucks <\/p>\n Corsi Chump:\u00a0On the flip side, Marco Rossi and the BRO line had a rough go of things against Mitch Marner and company. Rossi recorded a team-worst 24.14 CF%, on ice for a 1-10 shot hole with a goal against. It could\u2019ve been worse though, as Rossi also managed a 0.92 xGF% \u2013 that\u2019s right, less than 1% of the expected goals share during his TOI. That\u2019s a result of a team-low 0.02 xGF and 3rd-worst 1.75 xGA, with Rossi being out-chanced 1-13 and in a 0-6 high-danger chance hole. Simply put, it wasn\u2019t a good game for him statistically.<\/p>\n xGF:\u00a0Pettersson led the Canucks in this category too, posting a 54.96 xGF% on the night for a 39.89 xGF% rel to team average. The fact that he was this far ahead relative to team average goes to show what a struggle it was for the rest of the roster to get any of the share metrics going the Canucks\u2019 way. Pettersson managed to hold a 5-3 lead in scoring chances and a 2-2 split in high-danger chances, which is pretty darn good given how bad the raw numbers were for Vancouver. Unfortunately, despite doing plenty of good things from the numbers, the lack of production still haunts Pettersson\u2019s game from last night. His 0.8 xGF was the third best on the team, topped by Filip Hronek\u2019s team-high 0.97 xGF.<\/p>\n Crowd goes crazy as Mancini’s wrister deflected by Raty off post for Van’s first shot at 14:39. Vegas up 8-1 on shot clock. #Canucks<\/a><\/p>\n GSAx:\u00a0Nikita Tolopilo was balling out last night<\/a>. He had to stand on his head given how bad the Canucks were around him, Vegas managing to pile on 3.74 xGF during his TOI. Turning away all but 1 middle-danger chance and 1 low-danger chance, the Belarusian netminder finished with a 1.74 GSAx, sparkling when he needed to be. Tolopilo was pretty much the only player Vancouver had that turned up consistently, and the only reason why it wasn\u2019t a complete blowout for the Golden Knights.<\/p>\n Tolo says N\ud83d\uded1.<\/p>\n For every save made by #Canucks<\/a> goalies at home, @SchneiderElecCA<\/a> donates $20 to Indigenous Clean Energy. <\/p>\n As a team<\/p>\n CF% \u2013 40.57% HDCF% \u2013 30.00% xGF% \u2013 34.59%<\/p>\n This game was rough. There were little to no redeeming qualities when it came to the contents of the contest, the Canucks getting played off of their own home ice once again, and just being putrid in nearly every sense and regard. Again, if it wasn\u2019t for Tolopilo\u2019s excellent efforts, the final score would probably have been a lot worse. At the very least, there aren\u2019t too many more of these games<\/a> left to be watching.<\/p>\n Vancouver heads on the road, taking on the Los Angeles Kings tomorrow night.<\/p>\n Stats provided by naturalstattrick.com<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1775669539_813_image.webp\"\/)
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<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Statsies: Nikita Tolopilo turns away almost 2 goals above expected in loss against Vegas We\u2019re almost there.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":547763,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5128],"tags":[894,5,4,893,27,5313],"class_list":{"0":"post-547762","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-vancouver-canucks","8":"tag-canucks","9":"tag-hockey","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-vancouver","12":"tag-vancouver-canucks","13":"tag-vancouvercanucks"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116370286991047532","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/547763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}