The Canucks really have been 'right there' for a while now

Like it or not, the Vancouver Canucks have been keeping pace with their opponents for a while.

Call it being “right there”.

That’s a talking point Canucks head coach Adam Foote has used for some time, describing his under-gunned yet somehow plucky squad as being deserving of better than the losses they have piled up of late.

Speaking after Saturday’s disappointing 3-2 overtime loss to the Boston Bruins, a game the Canucks deserved to win but didn’t, Foote praised his team for not quitting even as they are going through a rough run of luck.

“We were in their face and we were relentless,” he said of how his team played vs. Boston.

Since Quinn Hughes was traded to Minnesota on Dec. 12, the Canucks have managed to just about break even in the shot attempts battle. That metric remains the best way to judge what a team is doing and is likely to do.

The Canucks have posted the 17th-best shot attempt percentage in the league over the past month. Outshooting your opponent has long proven to be the best predictor of future wins. The Canucks aren’t doing that, but they aren’t getting blown out of the water either.

And the quality of those shots has improved. After an ugly spike in bad defensive play during the run-up to Christmas, the Canucks have done a better job of reducing the quality of shots against, at least according to data produced by HockeyViz.com. (For data-collection reasons, HockeyViz’s shot-quality model is proving to be highly resilient, even if it’s not perfect.)

This is a battling team, no doubt. They have some strong pieces, like the current Elias Pettersson-Jake DeBrusk-Linus Karlsson first line.

That trio led the way against Boston, yielding not a single shot attempt against at five-on-five. That’s an astounding achievement. But as Jake DeBrusk lamented to me, they still lost.

There is little doubt how hard this team is working and is likely to keep working. The more young players who show up in the lineup, the more likely this is to continue. They are playing for their careers, after all.

That said, they are still struggling to defend the guts of the ice, as Rick Tocchet used to call it. That area on top of the crease is where the highest-probability scoring chances come from, and on the season the Canucks have been brutally below average in this regard. The recent improvements in defending on top of the crease have yet to make a dent in the overall pile of doggie-doo that their defensive data has been.

This is the chief reason why the Canucks have the fewest regulation wins in the league (10) halfway through the season, as well as the third-worst penalty kill (73.9 per cent), and the team has given up the third-most goals per game (3.46).

They were just bad for much of the first half of season, Quinn Hughes in the lineup or not. Now they’ve just been unlucky.

pjohnston@postmedia.com