Canucks’ Schneider comes up big, Wild’s scoring woes continue

Thursday’s game between the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Wild was a story of two teams on diverging paths.

In Vancouver, there’s plenty of drama surrounding their goaltending situation, but on the ice they can seem to do no wrong lately.

Starting Roberto Luongo — who is supposedly on his way out — in four straight games raised eyebrows, but it worked. Luongo allowed just five goals over that stretch and the Canucks went 3-0-1.

On Thursday, Cory Schneider got his first chance to start in a week and a half and proceeded to turn aside 22 of 23 shots in Vancouver’s 4-1 victory.

The Minnesota Wild made changes before this contest too. The only difference is that they were the result of poor play and didn’t pay off.

Secondary scoring has been an ongoing issue for Minnesota this season, but lately even its stars haven’t been particularly effective.

Wild coach Mike Yeo tried to split up the team’s top line of Zach Parise, Mikko Koivu and Dany Heatley. He also made rookie Mikael Granlund a healthy scratch and Devin Setoguchi was sent down to the fourth line.

All the same, the Wild were limited to a single goal for their third straight contest.

“This is a group that I have full confidence in that will pull out of this,” Yeo said, according to the Star Tribune’s Michael Russo.

Vancouver now has a 6-2-2 record this season while Minnesota has dropped to 4-5-1.