“Us guys that have been here a while, we’re sick of showing up and not being a playoff team. We know it’s time.” — Canucks winger Brock Boeser
VANCOUVER – This is Brock Boeser’s sixth season with the Vancouver Canucks. Only captain Bo Horvat has been with the team longer.
Elias Pettersson starts his fifth National Hockey League season Wednesday when the Canucks visit the Edmonton Oilers. It’s the fourth year for defenceman Quinn Hughes, the third season as a starting goalie for Thatcher Demko.
Over a three-year span, Pettersson won the Calder Trophy, while Boeser and Hughes were runners-up in rookie-of-the-year balloting.
But since Horvat’s rookie season in 2014-15, the Canucks have made the playoffs only once – a wild, 2020 run in the fan-less Edmonton bubble after a regular season shortened to 69 games by the arrival of the coronavirus.
“In order for us to raise the bar here with the standard and the culture, it’s about the players – the leadership group and what they show the other players,” Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin says. “What it takes every day, and how you need to push yourself and what kind of sacrifices and commitment you need to do here.”
“There are a lot of good players here,” president Jim Rutherford says. “But now we want to become a good team.”
As the Canucks open their 52nd season still looking for their first Stanley Cup, everyone in the organization has set a return to the playoffs as the bottom line. Either they’re in the Stanley Cup tournament next spring, or they are not.
Coach Bruce Boudreau has said it will be a “disaster” if the team fails again to earn playoff hockey.
The Canucks are good enough. Besides their excellent core of young players, topped by an emotional and impactful leader in 29-year-old forward J.T. Miller, Allvin has upgraded the forwards, adding free agents Andrei Kuzmenko and Ilya Mikheyev for skill and speed, and fourth-liners Curtis Lazar and Dakota Joshua for experience and physicality.
But by far the most significant change Allvin and Rutherford are trying to orchestrate is the mindset – the culture. Rutherford replaced Jim Benning as the head of hockey operations last December and hired Allvin as general manager in January. And since then, their constant theme has been an upgrade in standards.
It’s not as simple as just wanting to win. Nobody makes it to the NHL without being fiercely competitive; everyone likes winning. But it’s about the detail required to achieve this, the sacrifices required, the singular, daily focus on being your best and the enormous mental and physical commitment that winning requires.
Rutherford and Allvin came from a Stanley Cup-winning organization in Pittsburgh and noticed upon their arrival in Vancouver that the culture – accountability – was not the same.
“Sid’s the best example,” Rutherford says, referring to Penguins superstar Sidney Crosby. “I mean, if he really wanted to play the game a different way, he could get a lot more points. He’s all about playing the game the right way, a 200-foot game, and winning championships.
“I know players want to get their points because that’s related to how much money they make and all those things. But if you’re going to be a contending team, it’s not about the individual accomplishments, it’s about what the team accomplishes.”
It would be spectacularly unfair to blame the Canucks’ young, core players for the team’s recent failures.
After a dreadful start, Pettersson finished last season with a career-high 32 goals and 68 points. Hughes significantly upgraded his defensive play while still managing a 68-point season that shattered decades-old franchise records for a defenceman.
Boeser was in emotional agony most of the season, distraught over the decline of his gravely-ill father, Duke, who died in May. But even as a ghost some nights, Boeser still managed to score 23 goals. Horvat scored a career-high 31 and Demko had a breakthrough season as a starter, becoming a top-10 goalie in the NHL.
With the exception of Demko, all these players came to the Canucks when there was little expectation of team success. Their individual achievements were celebrated by fans and the media. But winning was a bonus and, until the summer of 2020, not really expected.
These players aren’t the reason the Canucks’ failed the last two seasons. But they are paramount to the team succeeding now. They understand this. Universally, they embrace the ideals of accountability and sacrifice and making winning the only measure that counts.
“Every guy’s got to keep doing better; that’s all it is,” Hughes says. “I don’t have to be anyone but myself. But I want to win, and whatever I have to do to make that happen, I’ll try to do.”
“Us guys that were here when we weren’t doing so well. . . we’ve learned a lot over the last couple years, especially last year when we started getting that winning culture,” Boeser says. “We kind of got a taste of how it feels to win. I think that’s why we all want to taste it more.”
After the December regime change, the Canucks finished 32-15-10 under Boudreau, missing the playoffs by six points when it had looked in late fall like they could miss it by 26.
Boudreau says his young stars are already changing the culture.
“I think they’ve been bought into that situation for a while now,” he says. “I think last year we got into that and it was all about winning. In the summer, every time I talked to them, it was just about winning. Nobody was talking about specific goals individually. So I believe that they’re all in tune.”
To help, Allvin signed Lazar as a free agent from the Boston Bruins. He joins a veteran leadership group that includes defencemen Luke Schenn, Tyler Myers and Oliver Ekman-Larsson and, of course, forwards Miller and Horvat.
“That’s the big thing I took away from Boston – just seeing the culture that they had in place,” Lazar says. “Following Patrice Bergeron was the easiest thing ever because, I mean, watching him sacrifice himself each and every day for the team’s good, it was easy to follow. I’m not going to fill the net, I’m not going to put up those points. But I can do those winning habits. I think that’s what we can buy into.”
Lazar says a winning culture is achieved when players take ownership of it and hold each other accountable. He says he could feel it the first time he walked into the Bruins’ dressing room. Everyone strived to meet Bergeron’s standards.
“Because if you didn’t, you were going to get yelled at – and it wasn’t by the coaches or anything,” Lazar explains. “It was that accountability within the dressing room. And I think that’s what we can instill here. When you’re young, you’re stubborn. You’re going to make mistakes and you’re going to think that you can do more when, ultimately, just doing your role is what’s going to help the team win. It takes time to learn that.”
Schenn says: “Coaches and management. . . they can’t babysit (players) and be there every day to preach the same thing about culture. It has to come from within the room. It’s like no one can let each other off the hook. It’s nothing personal. You’re trying to do what’s best for the team. That’s the only way you have success when that accountability, top to bottom, is sustained.”
Boudreau says Pettersson, 23, and Hughes, 22, have already become leaders on the Canucks. And nobody seems more determined to win than Demko, 26.
Canucks winger Tanner Pearson, another Stanley Cup winner who leads by example, says: “I think our young guys are competitive enough that there’s a point in time where you’re pretty sick of losing, and you’ll probably do anything you can to turn it around. The last couple of years have been difficult, so I think and I hope we’re at that point.”
“Players in the league don’t realize how quickly a career just flies by,” Allvin says. “Talking about J.T. Miller now being 29, he’s got another seven years left here to kind of build his legacy. When anybody is going to talk about J.T. Miller or Bo Horvat or Elias Pettersson, nobody’s going to remember how many points they had. They’re going to remember how many Cups they won. When you look up at the rafters at Rogers Arena, there is a lot of good hockey players that have their jerseys retired here, and I bet every single one would change it for a Cup.
“I think that’s where this group needs to understand that we haven’t really done anything. As a team and as an organization, we have a lot of things to prove. Every single day we step out on the ice, we have something to prove.”