Jeff Misenti
The Vancouver Canucks beat the Colorado Avalanche 8-6 at Ball Arena on Wednesday night, and for once, the ricochets mostly broke the team’s way.
Brock Boeser had a hat trick and an assist, Teddy Blueger scored twice, and Marcus Pettersson delivered the winning goal after Vancouver watched a four-goal lead disappear.
Topping off the victory, the Canucks have now snapped a six-game losing streak by beating the top team in the league, which says everything about how odd this game turned out.
Reuters reported that the Canucks set a season high in goals, while the Avalanche, who are still first in the Western Conference, spent most of the night chasing a game it never seemed ready to control until very late.
I’ve watched enough Canucks hockey to know when a game starts with one of those warning labels attached. This one had it right away, just not in the usual direction.
The flow of the game
Max Sasson scored 29 seconds in, the fastest Canucks goal since October 2024, and even after Nathan MacKinnon answered at 1:22 with his 50th of the season, the Canucks kept coming instead of folding.
At 5:21 of the first period, Blueger scored short-handed on a 2-on-1 with Liam Ohgren. Then Jake DeBrusk added a power-play goal at 11:38 after redirecting Elias Pettersson’s cross-crease pass.
Gabriel Landeskog cut it to 3-2 late in the first, but the Canucks never really let the Avalanche settle. In what was a shocking match-up, the Canucks were not just cashing in, they were doing it in different ways, early, on the penalty kill, on the power play, and later into an empty net.
Blueger struck again at 5:02 of the second, this time alone in the slot after taking a centering pass from Sasson. Boeser followed with goals at 9:42 and 15:21, and suddenly the Canucks were up 6-2 on the road against a team that had come in rolling.
NHL.com reported that the second Boeser goal ended Mackenzie Blackwood’s night, with Scott Wedgewood taking over after six goals on 19 shots. That’s the kind of score line that usually tells you the game is done. Usually.
The twist in the story
Then the game went sideways for the Canucks. Sam Malinski scored 22 seconds after the goalie change. Then Parker Kelly made it 6-4 just 14 seconds into the third, Brent Burns got Colorado within one at 13:21, and Malinski tied it at 6-6 only 37 seconds later.
The Avalanche erased that 6-2 hole in stages, and it felt like the whole building had tilted in one direction. For Canucks fans, that kind of collapse has usually been the ending, not the setup for one more twist.
What changed the mood again was how quickly the Canucks answered. Pettersson scored 23 seconds after the tying goal, his first since November, beating Wedgewood from the top of the left circle to make it 7-6.
That response was the biggest moment in the game. Boeser later added the empty-netter at 18:31 to finish his seventh regular-season hat trick.
There’s no point pretending this cleans up the season. It doesn’t. The Canucks still blew a huge lead, still gave up six goals, and still looked shaky when Colorado pushed. But they also beat the NHL’s top team in its own building, with MacKinnon hitting 50 and the Avalanche trying to ride the emotion of another comeback. Sometimes you take the chaos and move on. The Canucks face the Minnesota Wild today (Thursday, April 2) at 8:00 PM PT in the Xcel Energy Center.
