Vancouver isn’t built for the new NHL, but they can’t just start from scratch. And the problem isn’t behind the bench.
The vanquished Vancouver Canucks are going to hit the reset button this summer. They are going to reinvent themselves, which is probably something they should have thought about doing a year ago, maybe even two. In fact, since the Canucks took a 3–2 series lead in the 2011 Stanley Cup final against the Boston Bruins, they have won precisely one playoff game—against the Los Angeles Kings to avoid an opening-round sweep a year ago. This spring, of course, the Canucks made another hasty retreat, bounced in the opening round in four straight by San Jose. And there was a certain similarity between the Bruins and the Kings and the Sharks—they all possessed more size and grit than Vancouver.
It has felt for a while like the best-before date was looming over the Canucks, and that, given the teams they were losing to, they simply might not have what is required to win when it matters most. In a league in which big, powerful teams are prevailing, the Canucks have not conquered; they’ve merely survived. It’s not a question of coaching. It’s about the personnel on the bench. “Clearly the landscape has changed and we have to address those changes,” Canucks GM Mike Gillis said during his season-ending address. “It’s not something I necessarily agree with, but that’s what we face and that’s what we have to do.”
What took so long? There were alarm bells ringing when the Bruins beat them, and those bells were ringing again when they were dispatched by the Kings last spring. Whether Gillis misread the tea leaves, or stubbornly believed the Canucks’ way of playing—of relying more on pure skill than skill surrounded by brawn—would somehow prevail, only he really knows. But now the challenge is to fix something that is clearly broken. He somehow has to make the Canucks younger, bigger, tougher and deeper, and he intends to do it without uttering the word rebuild.
“We need to improve and we need to be different,” Gillis said. “We have to reinvent ourselves and do things differently to be successful.” If you’re wondering how he intends to do that, well, Gillis isn’t saying.
A big key to the future of the Canucks rests with goaltender Roberto Luongo. Not as a Canuck, but in whatever return Gillis can get for him on the trade market. The failure to trade him last summer, or this past season, was clearly a mistake. What Gillis can get now will have a huge impact on Vancouver’s future.
It’s easy to say you’re going to get younger, but when your cupboard is nearly bare of prospects, it isn’t easy to get younger as well as better, or even to tread water. If Gillis can somehow turn Luongo into a couple good, young players, that will go a long way. “We don’t have the luxury of having picked first overall in the last 10 years. We have to use the players we have, the core group we have, and we have to build around them,” he said. “There will come a point where that core group is going to be dismantled, but it’s not today. We have to find other ways to win.”
So it will be an interesting off-season in Vancouver. The hope of being close to a championship is gone. Now the focus is on how fast Gillis can hit that reset button, faced with salary cap challenges, a wad of no-trade clauses and an aging core group. Given all of that—the fact the game has changed and the Canucks haven’t, the short season and its challenges, the injuries, the failure to trade a goaltender—the coach shouldn’t be the fall guy. In fact, Alain Vigneault is the only guy who did his job well.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.
