Source: Iain MacIntyre , Vancouver Sun, March 16, 2016
One night before St. Patrick’s Day, Canucks ice a lean, green team and come up wee bit short
His first shift in the National Hockey League lasted 12 seconds, he didn’t touch anything but the ice and he was cheered by fans at Rogers Arena both when he left the bench and when he returned to it a few ticks later.
That’s how excited people were to see Nikita Tryamkin, the 6-7 Russian defenceman whose Vancouver Canuck debut was, absurdly, almost as eagerly anticipated as Pavel Bure’s a quarter-century earlier.
The 21-year-old has lots to learn, which is why the Canucks rushed him over from the Kontinental Hockey League when his season in Russia ended.
Ten points out of a playoff spot, the Canucks can afford to audition their semi-mysterious 2014 third-round draft pick and try to encourage Tryamkin to stay in North America next season even if it means forsaking a few KHL rubles to develop in the American Hockey League. Tryamkin is from Yekaterinburg; how bad could Utica, N.Y., be?
If he sticks around beyond the dying embers of this season, there will be growing pains for the 21-year-old and the Canucks, who iced a lineup Wednesday that included seven rookies and were beaten 3-1 by the Colorado Avalanche.
It’s a tough way to try to win in the best league in the world.
“You have to come back to look at our team and the personnel and what we’re trying to do here,” Canucks captain Henrik Sedin said. “It would have been tougher if we would have been a Stanley Cup contender and going through this. But we know where we are (as an organization). It’s tough to win games in this league; we’re trying to understand that. We’ve just got to get better and move forward.”
Missing eight injured players during a rebuild in which depth and experience are lacking, this was probably the youngest Canucks lineup in a generation.
“Whenever you have new guys coming in, they bring their game to the team and they bring their energy,” 23-year-old winger Sven Baertschi said. “Fresh energy is always good. Nothing changes — we still have a winning mentality. That starts with the older guys passing it along to us. It doesn’t matter who’s in the lineup: The mentality is always the same, and that’s to win.”
The Canucks are 7-13-1 the last eight weeks. They can afford to experiment.
We’re not sure how impressed the Minnesota Wild were with the Canucks lineup that allowed the Avalanche to move a point ahead in the race for the final playoff spot in the Western Conference, but Desjardins dressing Tryamkin and six other rookies gave fans and reporters something to talk about.