Like a lot of his teammates, Quinn Hughes feels faster and stronger as he awaits his first taste of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Canucks | imacSportsnet
EDMONTON – He has never played an NHL playoff game, so what Quinn Hughes experiences Sunday night against the Minnesota Wild is likely to be faster, tougher and harder than anything he has seen.
The Canucks and Wild play a five-game qualifying series to advance to the final 16, and Hughes has been a huge part of everything his team has done this season. Brock Boeser, Hughes’ 23-year-old teammate, is at the end of his third NHL season and only now appears to have discovered the right conditioning balance. Like the Sedins, Boeser got too heavy in his initial rush to get stronger for the NHL. But Boeser spent the COVID-19 shutdown working on cardio at home in Minnesota and has looked fitter and faster since returning to the Canucks. He is also fully healthy for the first time in a while.
“I didn’t know how long we were going to be off so I just took a couple of weeks off at the start,” Hughes explained. “I’d been playing hurt a little bit towards the end and so I needed a break just for that. But then coach Green kind of got on me to start working out and trying to use this to my advantage to get stronger and better. He said this would be good for the team and it would help me, too, so he was on me a lot, calling me pretty much every week to discuss how things were going.
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