BOCA RATON, Fla. — In GM years, Mike Gillis is looking about 75 these days. The neck beard is thick, the bags under his eyes are Samsonite in magnitude. His team is adrift, his coach doesn’t have any answers—and does anyone really know if ownership ever did have Gillis’s back?
The Vancouver GM could use a few more days here in the Florida sun, to be sure, and a tall double. What he doesn’t need is the media-driven proctology exam that ensues any time a GM gives his coach the old “vote of confidence,” and then fires him later on. The media is paid to ask Gillis if Canucks coach John Tortorella’s job is safe. And Gillis, staring into a thicket of microphones, cameras and digital recorders Wednesday at the NHL’s GM meetings, would only complicate his own job if he answered truthfully.
Is it a tough spot to be in? You’re damned right it is. “For me to comment would lend some degree of credibility to it, which is not something that’s good for anybody,” said Gillis. “I think right now we have to get behind our team and behind our players and behind our coaching staff and try and win some hockey games.”
Gillis was of a bunker mentality Wednesday, and honestly, we’re not even sure if he’s the guy to ask about the Tortorella hire anymore. Did the Aquilini brothers make that decision for him? Are the owners the only reason why Ryan Kesler is still a Canuck? Did Vancouver seriously over-estimate Eddie Lack’s ability to be a No. 1 when they traded Cory Schneider and Roberto Luongo? Is anyone still not sure that the idiocy of Tortorella’s 15-day, six-game suspension crushed any remnants of a relationship between coach and GM in Vancouver?
All in all, it has been a Canucks season nobody could fathom.
“To go from December where you win every game in the month to what’s occurred since then is remarkable,” Gillis said. “But there are some reasons: We’ve had massive injuries this year; we’ve had key guys out of our lineup for extended periods of time; we had an incident in January that was hard to describe…”
Wait a second. What was that?
“We had an incident in January that was hard to describe…”
The incident was Tortorella attacking the Flames dressing room. It was a coach who pleads for disciplined, team-first play thinking only of himself. He hurt the team, and made his GM look bad for hiring him. The GM, for all we know, is doing everything he can not to say to his owners, “Well, you hired this guy. How’s that working out for you?”
It isn’t every day that Mike Gillis finds himself in a sympathetic position, but if his owners are calling the shots, he’s got two choices: Walk, or become a puppet. Walking would cost him the final four years of his own deal, suspected to be worth $2 million per. Staying might be costing him his self-respect.
And what if Gillis looks at the weight of the evidence and decides that Tortorella can not return, despite the fact he has four years and $8 million remaining on his ridiculously long contract? Then what?
On Wednesday, Gillis looked like a man who was two steps down a 20-foot plank. The day before, back home in Vancouver, Tortorella appeared vulnerable, opening up to the press like a wounded lover in a nearly 13-minute display of insecurity. It was so un-Torts-like. “This is my responsibility,” he said. “It’s on my watch. I know the area, I know the owners, I know my general manager is not sitting well with it.”
What happened to the Torts who controlled the podium like it was the line of scrimmage in an NFL game? The passive-aggressive Larry Brooks battler, who had as much love for the media as Rob Ford?
Suddenly he’s making friends. Or, should we say, allies?
“I think we have a good relationship, the players and I,” he said. “It isn’t that complicated a guy that they’re dealing with here.”
Yeah, right. John Tortorella is not complicated. Compared to, say, Sigmund Freud. Or nuclear physics.
Gillis has been accused before, if you’ll excuse us, of being the smartest guy in the room. Today, with what has happened above him and below him in this Canucks organization, he must feel like anything but.