Everyone knows the Vancouver Canucks have a young core, but at some point they have to learn to count higher than one.
Another one-game winning streak ended Tuesday when the Canucks were handily beaten 5-2 by the Winnipeg Jets, 24 hours after Vancouver’s 4-0 win in Manitoba marked one of its best performances in what has been a pretty dismal National Hockey League season.
It was the same story two weeks ago when the Canucks returned home from a 5-1 win in Calgary and were shut out 2-0 by the Jets. Vancouver followed its 4-1 win in Winnipeg on Jan. 30 by getting embarrassed by the Montreal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs, who combined for five straight wins over the Canucks by an aggregate score of 26-10.
As needy as anyone for a winning streak, the Canucks have not managed consecutive victories since January. Each time they appear to make a turn upwards in the standings, the Canucks just keep rotating until they’re facing straight down again. Two 180s equal 360 degrees.
Monday, they were terrific. Tuesday, they were mediocre. Thursday against the Maple Leafs, who knows?
“I thought Winnipeg played better than us, quite frankly,” Canucks coach Travis Green said. “I thought we made a couple of soft plays with the puck that cost us a couple goals. I didn’t like our second period. And the third period was an average period (and)… we didn’t have enough good, solid play to make a comeback.
“I just thought that Winnipeg was a little harder on the puck than us, harder in the one-on-one battles, stronger in certain areas. And the night before, we had a good night in those areas.”
Green went with convention over numbers by starting backup goalie Braden Holtby over Thatcher Demko, who posted a 27-save shutout on Monday. In six starts over the previous three weeks, Demko’s save percentage was .927. In his previous five starts, Holtby’s save rate was .879. Their form hasn’t been close to comparable.
But Green followed the NHL playbook and split the back-to-back starts, and sure enough Holtby allowed a couple of goals to leak through him. After a series of comedic errors by the Canucks, Mathieu Perreault somehow found himself on a breakaway in the final seconds of the first period and beat the buzzer with a backhand that drifted between Holtby’s arm and torso.
That broke a 1-1 tie. And the Jets’ Kyle Connor made it 3-1 on a power play at 5:04 of the second period, shooting through the goalie’s pads when Holtby’s moved across his net with the grace and sturdiness of a newborn fawn.
“I have to make those stops tonight,” Holtby said. “That’s about as simple as it gets. Going back to back, a game we felt like we needed to win, myself and I think most of us, I think we need to be better.”
This loss, however, wasn’t on Holtby, who faced 39 shots from a Winnipeg team that maintained control of the game – and scoring chances – even as Vancouver was supposed to be chasing it.
J.T. Miller’s power-play one-timer brought the Canucks within a goal, down 3-2, with five seconds remaining in the middle period. It could have lifted the team, allowed the Canucks to at least salvage something from a night when they were second-best.
Instead, the Jets badly outplayed them in the first half of the third period and Paul Stastny’s goal made it 4-2 at 9:13.
Incredibly, the Canucks are now 0-13-1 this season when trailing after 40 minutes. They’ve pocketed one point out of 28 in those games. They are also a perfectly awful 0-13-0 when the opposition scores first. Not a single point this season after trailing 1-0.
“I feel like today, we didn’t give ourselves a chance to win,” centre Elias Pettersson said after scoring in the first period to briefly get the Canucks back into a tie. “I think they were the better team. We turned over the puck, didn’t win enough puck battles. We’ve got to bring a better effort than what we did today to be able to win.”
Miller said: “We get a chance to kind of hang around a game, 3-2 going into the third. We need to come up with at least a point today, at least just put a better effort on the ice than that. We’re not in a position to not bring our best.
“We’re not in a position to be splitting series. We need to win. We can fall back on that we’ve been playing pretty darn well for the last couple of weeks, three weeks, but… we have to win games right now.”
The Canucks are 9-15-2, and their players are the only ones in Vancouver still talking about the playoffs.
“I think every game we lose at this point is a missed opportunity,” Holtby said. “We’ve put ourselves in a spot where we need every game. That’s the mentality we have to have in order to get ourselves back in this.”
Winning two in a row would help. How else to dream about three?
PARIS (AP) — French judicial authorities are investigating the disappearance of two Paralympic athletes from Congo who recently competed in the Paris Games, the prosecutor’s office in the Paris suburb of Bobigny confirmed on Thursday.
Prosecutors opened the investigation on Sept. 7, after members of the athletes’ delegation warned authorities of their disappearance two days before.
Le Parisien newspaper reported that shot putter Mireille Nganga and Emmanuel Grace Mouambako, a visually impaired sprinter who was accompanied by a guide, went missing on Sept. 5, along with a third person.
The athletes’ suitcases were also gone but their passports remained with the Congolese delegation, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not allowed to speak publicly about the case.
The Paralympic Committee of the Democratic Republic of Congo did not respond to requests for information from The Associated Press.
Nganga — who recorded no mark in the seated javelin and shot put competitions — and Mouambako were Congo’s flag bearers at the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games, organizers said.
An investigator gave the World Anti-Doping Agency a pass on its handling of the inflammatory case involving Chinese swimmers, but not without hammering away at the “curious” nature of WADA’s “silence” after examining Chinese actions that did not follow rules designed to safeguard global sports.
WADA on Thursday released the full decision from Eric Cottier, the Swiss investigator it appointed to analyze its handling of the case involving the 23 Chinese swimmers who remained eligible despite testing positive for performance enhancers in 2021.
In echoing wording from an interim report issued earlier this summer, Cottier said it was “reasonable” that WADA chose not to appeal the Chinese anti-doping agency’s explanation that the positives came from contamination.
“Taking into consideration the particularities of the case, (WADA) appears … to have acted in accordance with the rules it has itself laid out for anti-doping organizations,” Cottier wrote.
But peppered throughout his granular, 56-page analysis of the case was evidence and reminders of how WADA disregarded some of China’s violations of anti-doping protocols. Cottier concluded this happened more for the sake of expediency than to show favoritism toward the Chinese.
“In retrospect at least, the Agency’s silence is curious, in the face of a procedure that does not respect the fundamental rules, and its lack of reaction is surprising,” Cottier wrote of WADA’s lack of fealty to the world anti-doping code.
Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and one of WADA’s fiercest critics, latched onto this dynamic, saying Cottier’s information “clearly shows that China did not follow the rules, and that WADA management did nothing about it.”
One of the chief complaints over the handling of this case was that neither WADA nor the Chinese gave any public notice upon learning of the positive tests for the banned heart medication Temozolomide, known as TMZ.
The athletes also were largely kept in the dark and the burden to prove their innocence was taken up by Chinese authorities, not the athletes themselves, which runs counter to what the rulebook demands.
Despite the criticisms, WADA generally welcomed the report.
“Above all, (Cottier) reiterated that WADA showed no bias towards China and that its decision not to appeal the cases was reasonable based on the evidence,” WADA director general Olivier Niggli said. “There are however certainly lessons to be learned by WADA and others from this situation.”
Tygart said “this report validates our concerns and only raises new questions that must be answered.”
Cottier expanded on doubts WADA’s own chief scientist, Olivier Rabin, had expressed over the Chinese contamination theory — snippets of which were introduced in the interim report. Rabin was wary of the idea that “a few micrograms” of TMZ found in the kitchen at the hotel where the swimmers stayed could be enough to cause the group contamination.
“Since he was not in a position to exclude the scenario of contamination with solid evidence, he saw no other solution than to accept it, even if he continued to have doubts about the reality of contamination as described by the Chinese authorities,” Cottier wrote.
Though recommendations for changes had been expected in the report, Cottier made none, instead referring to several comments he’d made earlier in the report.
Key among them were his misgivings that a case this big was largely handled in private — a breach of custom, if not the rules themselves — both while China was investigating and after the file had been forwarded to WADA. Not until the New York Times and German broadcaster ARD reported on the positives were any details revealed.
“At the very least, the extraordinary nature of the case (23 swimmers, including top-class athletes, 28 positive tests out of 60 for a banned substance of therapeutic origin, etc.), could have led to coordinated and concerted reflection within the Agency, culminating in a formal and clearly expressed decision to take no action,” the report said.
WADA’s executive committee established a working group to address two more of Cottier’s criticisms — the first involving what he said was essentially WADA’s sloppy recordkeeping and lack of formal protocol, especially in cases this complex; and the second a need to better flesh out rules for complex cases involving group contamination.
The French league’s legal commission has ordered Paris Saint-Germain to pay Kylian Mbappé the 55 million euros ($61 million) in unpaid wages that he claims he’s entitled to, the league said Thursday.
The league confirmed the decision to The Associated Press without more details, a day after the France superstar rejected a mediation offer by the commission in his dispute with his former club.
