If Saturday night’s merciful season finale marked the end of Alexandre Burrows’ Vancouver Canucks tenure, then the veteran winger went out in style.
For maybe one last time, Burrows rose to the occasion with a shootout goal. For maybe one last time, he brought the Rogers Arena faithful to their feet and unfurled an imaginary arrow to the heavens – his longstanding tribute to fallen teammate Luc Bourdon.
“Things change quickly so you never know what can happen,” Burrows said after the game, in regards to his uncertain future in Vancouver. “I haven’t got any confirmation from management either way, so for me, I was just trying to have fun tonight with the twins. I thought we had some good shifts in there and remembered me from the past and we’ll see what happens.
“I went about my business, tried to have a good game and focus on the game and have a good night for the twins.”
Burrows improbably broke into the NHL with the Canucks a decade ago and the prime of his career will be defined by his lethal partnership with Henrik and Daniel Sedin. For perhaps the final time on Saturday, he rode shotgun with the Sedins.
“I hope he’s still here,” Henrik said after the game, refusing to talk about Burrows’ Canucks legacy in the past tense. “He’s still here for me, until we hear something else. I haven’t heard anything from within this organization, I know there’s been a lot of talk from media and fans, but to me he’s still here.”
At the tail end of a nightmare campaign, it was an appropriate potential send-off for a veteran winger who has meant an awful lot to the Canucks franchise and their fans over the years.
Seemingly reviled by 29 fan bases, many on-ice officials and more in the media; Burrows has been a controversial figure. And there’s no denying that the 34-year-old isn’t anyone’s idea of a prefect or choirboy.
For Canucks fans though, Burrows’ antics – indefensible as they sometimes were – were part of the appeal. If he was a jerk on the ice, he was their jerk.
It all fed into the mythology. Burrows was never drafted. He cut his teeth in professional hockey playing for storied franchises like the Greenville Grrrowl. It was unlikely that he’d go on to a lengthy NHL career; much less build a storied legacy of hockey excellence in Vancouver.
A pesky fourth-liner for his first three seasons as an NHL regular, Burrows was given a shot as the triggerman for the Sedin twins in the midst of an extended losing streak in 2008-09. Alain Vigneault, Vancouver’s head coach at the time, was simply out of options.
Burrows scored a game-winning goal over San Jose, unleashed the ‘streak breaker’ goal celebration and the rest is history.
From 2008-09 through to 2011-12, Burrows scored 97 even-strength goals. Only two players – Steven Stamkos and Alex Ovechkin – scored more goals at 5-on-5 during that period. The in-your-face winger managed to produce like a superstar and did so while earning a paltry $2 million a year. He was, for a while, the best bargain in hockey.
It’s almost ironic that Burrows’ now out-sized cap-hit could spell an end to his time with the only NHL franchise he’s ever played for. Life moves fast.
The Canucks signed Burrows to a four-year, $18 million contract in the days before the 2013 NHL lockout. Vancouver’s former management team knew that the deal could become an iffy bet on the back end, but believed the extension was necessary. Burrows had given the franchise too much.
With Burrows’ production and two-way form now atrophying, that deal has become an albatross.
Though there’s been no outright indication one way or the other, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the club decided to exercise an ordinary course buy-out on Burrows’ deal this summer. Because the final year of Burrows’ contract will pay him just $3 million in salary (though his cap-hit sits at $4.5 million), the hard cost of buying out his deal is just $1 million in salary in each of the next two seasons.
The cap savings, meanwhile, would be significant. Buying out Burrows allows Vancouver to shave $2 million off the cap for next season. In concert with an expected buyout for Chris Higgins, the Canucks – who are desperate for scoring help and help on the back-end – can build in more than $3.5 million in additional cap space for next season.
Whatever the particular salary cap mechanics, it all seems a bit anti-septic when considering what Saturday night may have meant. Burrows slayed dragons in Vancouver, ended a Stanley Cup overtime in the blink of an eye and often paid tribute to a fallen teammate with his imaginary bow and arrow.
On Saturday his bow-and-arrow salute was done, in part, at the request of the fans.
“We had the fan appreciation before the game, it was the first time we’ve ever done that the last day of the year, and there had to be 5,000 (fans) maybe more,” Burrows recalled. “The 20 minutes I was signing autographs there was probably 10-12 people who asked me to shoot an arrow if I scored tonight, so I thought it could be a cool salute for them and for Luc too.”
If this really is the end of his Canucks career, he’ll finish in the top-10 on the franchise’s all-time leaderboard in games played and on the fringes of the top-10 in total goals.
And on Saturday it certainly seemed as if the Sedin twins were looking to get him a goal. They’ve often talked about how he made it easy on them, how they could dump the puck into the corner and know he’d come out with it. Even if he hadn’t had an uncanny knack for converting their withering puck control into goals scored, he consistently made them more formidable defensively.
“You could tell right away when he stepped on the ice that he knows where to go, he knows where to put the pucks, everything feels easy,” Henrik said of playing with Burrows on Saturday.
Chemistry has come easy for Burrows and the Sedin twins, but there’s nothing easy about a potential goodbye. If Saturday night’s shootout victory marked the final chapter in Burrows’ storybook Canucks tenure, at least the story had a near perfect ending.
