VANCOUVER — They say history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce.
Make no mistake, what happened at Rogers Arena on Saturday night, when the Canucks were routed by the Buffalo Sabers 5-1 and voraciously booed their rink in Game 6 of this young NHL season. , was not tragic – even if the club’s performance was.
No, the tragedy was felt in 2018, when the club never found a way to recharge with enough discipline or strategic consistency in the Jim Benning era, ultimately failing to provide Henrik and Daniel Sedin with another relevant squad. on which to play before their retirement.
What we are witnessing now is a farce.
The Vancouver market, and most troubling, players on that ill-fated Canucks team, are so used to going through “team in crisis” motions that we apparently sped the process up this time around.
The regular season only started 10 days ago! Ten days!
That didn’t stop this team from setting a new record, not just for blown runs, but for how quickly they completed the performative stages that bad teams ritually go through, as the reality of their ineptitude fades away. installs during the NHL regular season.
After blowing multiple-goal leads in their first three games, the Canucks had a players-only meeting in Washington last week. It was only three games.
Before we can figure that out, the club lost another lead to Columbus. After four games, the insider reports that management is not (yet) considering a change behind the bench.
After another failed third-half lead in Game 5, the club went home and struck an unconvincing pose, insisting their play was going in the right direction.
Finally, on Saturday night, the club returned to the supposedly friendly Rogers Arena. And this one had it all.
The road team opened the scoring with an awkward power play goal. A gentleman wearing a retro Canucks jersey and a paper bag on his head, posing for photos with other fans in his section. Fans booed during play as the game rolled away from Vancouver. They booed as the Sabers’ top line rolled the puck endlessly into the Vancouver game. They booed the Canucks on the power play. They even booed “Sweet Caroline”.
There was a tough moment between JT Miller and Luke Schenn, following a late turnover from Miller in the second half, as the inevitable tension surfacing between the teammates in the face of the constant desperation to lose spilled over into public view.
Heard HNIC had the clip of JT Miller and Luke Schenn arguing at the end of the second, came back and grabbed it at the end of the intermission.
It’s not a happy team right now. #Canucks pic.twitter.com/FhA99eSys6
— Lachlan Irvine (@LachInTheCrease) October 23, 2022
By the end of the night, Canucks head coach Bruce Boudreau was tearing up the effort level of his players. He said his message to his team after the game was that they should “look in the mirror”.
During one fascinating moment of his postgame availability, Boudreau appeared to be negotiating against himself — as the Canucks have often done when signing overpriced veteran players — trying in vain to convince himself that his players didn’t have not dropped in the third period.
“I never like to use that word,” Boudreau said of the idea that his players might have “given up” late. “It looked like they were saying, ‘Oh, there’s no way we can catch up.
“And because they haven’t had any success yet…I mean, I would like think that there was nobody out there saying, “I don’t care what happens now, I’m quitting,” but, I just can’t, I’ll never accept that in my mind.
“But I mean it, definitely…like when you want two men to forecheck because you need a goal and only one man comes in. And I mean, they know exactly what they’re supposed to do on a couple of the goals, and in our D zone they don’t do it at all… it’s really frustrating.
“I hope the players feel the same way I do about this: it’s totally embarrassing…if I were the fans I would have been frustrated too.” – Boudreau on reaction. #Canucks
— Thomas Drance (@ThomasDrance) October 23, 2022
Finally, to cap off the evening, Jim Rutherford, the club’s still relatively new president of hockey operations, appeared on Hockey Night in Canada’s “After Hours” interview show, fresh from a heartbreaking and heartbreaking loss. for his team.
He was asked the million-dollar question we’ve all asked ourselves, even though we’ve secretly always known the answer: “Why won’t this organization commit to rebuilding itself?”
In fact, more specifically, he was asked by longtime VIP Graham M., “Jim – we want a reconstruction, we want a reconstruction since the end of the Sedin era. Why is this team so strongly opposed to giving us a rebuild? »
“Yeah well,” Rutherford began, after his club’s defeat at the hands of a young rising side who traded Jack Eichel just 11 months previously, “I think people need to realize how long rebuilds take .
“You look at some of the teams that have been there and we look at them now and how good they are now, but there were a lot of tough years. We may very well be in a rebuild in the direction we are going, but ideally we would like to transition this team on the fly.
“We have some core players, young players who are really good, and those guys just need to keep working and trying to overcome that at this stage. But we will continue to add younger players to this squad and bring it together over the next year. »
He tells everything you need to know about the state of this era of the Canucks — and the farce their fans are living now — just weeks away from the 29-year-old forward’s $56 million seven-year commitment. , the club is already moving rapidly in a direction where the new management’s preferred plan to “transition this team on the fly” is untenable.
The transition on the fly is untenable because it is in total contradiction with the reality and the capabilities of this team. There just isn’t enough talent at the back to make this team credible in the short term. The infrastructure is simply lacking.
More importantly, though, it’s untenable due to the appetite of paying customers in this hockey-savvy market.
looked like a #Canucks The jersey was thrown onto the ice after the Sabres scored 4-1, as Al Murdoch pleaded with the crowd ‘not to throw any objects on the ice’.
— Thomas Drance (@ThomasDrance) October 23, 2022
The fans want a plan. They want protest. They want real hopefully, not that flimsy, artificial stuff the organization sells to the gullible every summer, only to have it wiped out by November year after year.
Saturday night, at least, the fans made that very clear. And it only took six games.
(Photo of Buffalo Sabers players celebrating a goal as Canucks players look dejected: Jeff Vinnick/NHLI via Getty Images)
#Drance #Canucks #fans #deserve #demanded #embarrassing #opener