Lucas Raymond did plenty of damage Thursday night, and the Red Wings never let the Canucks find a way back in.
Raymond scored twice and added an assist as Detroit rolled to a 5-2 win in Vancouver, stretching its points streak to six straight games at 3-0-3. William Wallinder, Michael Rasmussen and Emmitt Finnie also scored for the Red Wings, while Michael Brandsegg-Nygard and Viktor Arvidsson each finished with two assists.
Detroit’s grip on this matchup has been a long one, too. The Red Wings are now 9-1-1 in their past 11 meetings with the Canucks.
The game took a sharp turn in the first period, when Detroit buried three goals before the opening 20 minutes were done. Raymond started the scoring at 4:18 by redirecting an Albert Johansson point shot short side past Kevin Lankinen. Just 1:46 later, Wallinder made it 2-0 when his shot went off Lankinen’s pad and in.
Vancouver answered on the power play at 7:02, with Elias Pettersson ripping in a Filip Hronek feed between John Gibson’s pads. But Detroit quickly snuffed out any momentum. At 8:56, Raymond struck again on the power play, poking in an Alex DeBrincat pass to push the lead back to two.
The Canucks never found any rhythm after that. Detroit outshot Vancouver 11-5 in the opening period and then kept the Canucks without a shot on goal in the second, a brutal stretch for a home team already stuck in a spiral.
Rasmussen added to the cushion at 14:58 of the second period, redirecting an Anton Johansson point shot for his first goal of the season and making it 4-1.
Detroit then got more insurance early in the third when Finnie scored four minutes in, beating Lankinen after the Canucks goalie lost his edge on the play. Vancouver trimmed the margin to 5-2 at 10:37 on Jonathan Lekkerimaki’s tap-in off a Marco Rossi cross-ice feed, but that was as close as it got.
Lekkerimaki finished with a goal and an assist, and Pettersson also scored for Vancouver, which has now gone nine straight without a win at 0-8-1. The Canucks dropped to 1-4-0 at home.
Lankinen stopped 26 shots in the loss and fell to 1-7-0 on the season.
Detroit’s night also included a scare in goal. Gibson made four saves on five shots through two periods before leaving with an upper-body injury. Michal Postava, recalled from AHL Grand Rapids on Wednesday, came on for the third period and stopped seven of eight shots in his NHL debut.
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