WATCH: Coach John Tortorella responds to comments GM Mike Gillis made in a radio interview Thursday.
The Vancouver Canucks will face the LA Kings at Rogers Arena tonight in a final push to try and secure a playoff spot.
However, it’s not going to be easy, and if the Canucks fall to the Kings and the Dallas Stars win against Tampa Bay, the Canucks will be officially eliminated from post-season play.
Henrik Sedin is expected to return tonight, having missing the previous four games due to injury. It is unknown at this time if LA defenseman Drew Doughty will play tonight howerver, after leaving the Kings’ game on April 3 with an upper body injury.
The Canucks go into this game seven points out of the Western Conference’s last playoff berth and they only have five games left. The LA Kings have already clinched a playoff spot.
The Kings are also 4-0 over the Canucks this season and many might remember the game in January where the Kings won by 1-0. There were 109 penalty minutes handed out in that game and it’s unknown if we’ll see that same kind of passion on the ice tonight.
On Friday Canucks coach John Tortorella blamed himself for his struggling club’s woes.
“We were playing a style of game that we wanted to play the first couple of months, those first 35-40 games,” Tortorella said after practice. “It’s a style that we continue to teach right now. When we went to California and went through that twice in two weeks, got banged up a little bit, we did have to change a bit. We lost some guys. My mistake is not shaking us back to aggressiveness quick enough.
“I don’t think we got fully healthy, but I did not do a good enough job of getting us back to the style that we should be playing when we were banged up there. We were conservative. We had to be.”
Tortorella’s future with the Canucks, along with that of general manager Mike Gillis, is still in question.
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