Okay, Positives vs Negatives from last nights game.

Positives:

• Hemsky was flying, at least for the first period and a good chunk of the second.  I particularly noticed him several times on the powerplay resembling the force that I hope he can be.  It's only a matter of time, there will be a break-out game and soon enough Hemmer will be the dominant force we all want him to be, especially if he plays with Nilsson consistently and they develop more chemistry.  I definitely noticed a compatibility between the two of them, and it will only become more prominent the more they play together.
• Nilsson has continued his elevated level of play.  Last season I barely noticed Nilsson, perhaps it was because of the hype that followed his linemates, Gagner and Cogliano, everywhere.  But this season it seems as if he's working harder, backchecking effectively and creating chances whenever he's on the ice, and this can only be a good thing.
• Cole was absolutely flying on his natural wing, until he was ejected of course.  I look forward to seeing him play a complete game on the right side, as he is clearly more comfortable and dominant in that position.  His strength on the puck is excellent, and I think its only a matter of time until he starts to produce like we hoped he would at the start of the season.
• Our breakout and movement through the neutral zone was leaps and bounds better than the two games prior to last night.  We were giving the puck up less (we haven't lowered the giveaways quite low enough yet, but we're getting there), and our passing is getting better, there seems to be less kicking a pass from a player's skates up to his stick.
• We scored three times.  This is self explanatory, in the two games we played prior to this one we only scored once, thus three goals in one game is a vast improvement over the last two games, although 4 or 5 perhaps would have been ideal we can still win a game on 3 if we buckle down defensively.

Negatives:

• Our special teams are dismal.  The powerplay seemed to be tugging along at a decent rate early on in the season, and if we can get it back on track it won't be a worry anymore; however, our penalty-kill has been terrible all season, this past game we were running around and seemed to be breaking our box a lot in favour of chasing the puck.  Vancouver scored 4 powerplay goals on 6 opportunities, and we all know that Vancouver's powerplay is not that good (not good enough to be operating at 67% at least).  It can be said that we lost two of our best penalty killers over the summer in Reasoner and Stoll, but we need to find a way to kill these penalties.
• Which leads me to this: we took too many penalties at inopportune times, not that there really is a good time to take penalties.  Now granted, and I'm not blaming the loss on the refs by any means, some calls (Horcoff's interference call) were less than stellar, but I thought that the majority of calls made were calls that weren't outlandish at all.  We have to take less penalties, as our penalty kill is failing miserably as of late.

     Cole...  Do up your strap.  Enough said.

• Our defensive play was weak, there were too many odd man rushes coming down on Garon, and in particular on the 6th goal he was left out to dry as a 3 on 1 barrelled down on him.  Perhaps something needs to be done about poorly advised pinches, but the most notable problem is our tendency to make difficult and/or risky passes, and it seems that they always end up being picked off resulting in a chance in our end.

I actually found more positives from last game than negatives, I thought we put in a good effort for the majority of the game, although the typical phrase "we have to play for the whole 60 minutes" definitely applies here.  I look forward to hopefully watching most of the glaring negatives disappear and seeing this team become the team we thought they would be at the beginning of the season.