Canucks Coffee: Rick Tocchet is right. Big games are important.

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Rick Tocchet weighed in during his postgame comments after Thursday's 4-0 loss to the Boston Bruins.

His team is scoring points.

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But you know he's a little worried. To stay at the top, you have to be relentless in how you work.

What he saw of the Canucks against the Bruins was indifferent.

If this team has a chance to realize their ambitions, they cannot afford to be complacent.

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So while he made his postgame comments his team's 13-game undefeated streak, he was also open about the easy comparisons between his team and the Bruins.

“A lot of people looked at us tonight. They (Bruins) didn't play well the last game. The coach called them. They were seen,” he said.

The subtext of this competition was that he did not have his own team.

They fell behind early and never found anything. He criticized his star players. He noted that quality from the top is not enough.

The Canucks have a good chance of playing a team like St. Louis, Seattle or Nashville in the first round of the playoffs.

None of those teams are as talented as these Bruins, but they play a tough, organized style of defense that is similar to Boston's. The Blues caused a lot of trouble for the Canucks.

You can see why Tocchet was worried.

What's wrong with Petey?

Elias Pettersson may have been named one of the NHL's January stars. There is no doubt that it was a big statistical month.

But then you look a little closer and you see something a little disturbing.

He was primed on the power play and in overtime, but it's been 11 games since Petterson went five-for-five.

It's nice to have him in the big moments, but you'd like to see him find ways to control the game at five-on-five, especially with the playoffs now sitting on the horizon.

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PDO'd

The Canucks remain the “happiest” team in the NHL.

If you add in shooting percentage and keep track of the percentage—a metric called PDO—you'll find that most teams match a combined number around 1,000. This is a well-known, well-understood fact.

This means that if you are above 1000, you are a little lucky, and if you are below, you are a little unlucky.

Either way, the Canucks PDO has been wild all season. That's currently 1,046, the best in the league.

It is due to the uniform shooting percentage.

Year after year, the best teams are shooting around 10 percent.

The Canucks' share is now 11.5 percent. It was sometimes higher than 12 percent.

It is expected to drop below 11 and up to 10. Given how well they play defense, they're probably the most in one-goal games.

The Canucks have a record for winning by two or more goals – they have 23 this season, more than twice as many as they have by one goal.

An interesting point of comparison is who is second in PDO: the Boston Bruins.

The Bruins' high PDO of 1,035 is driven by an excellent save percentage.

They will leak some goals themselves, but like the Canucks, they may absorb some of that into their high scoring streak, which suits the Canucks just fine.

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