The Vancouver Canucks are the only team that hasn’t won yet in the current season of NHL hockey. After years of misery, the die-hard fans of the Canadian club ran out of patience.
In 2011, they lost their seventh Stanley Cup Final against Boston. Since then, however, the Canucks have had inconsistent performances and a gradual decline. Now it’s as if they don’t know how to proceed.
In the new year, they collected only two points for overtime losses and are last in the league. They fell seven times in total.
The penultimate defeat hurt them the most. On the weekend against Buffalo, they played at home for the first time in the season and had to make up for an unsuccessful trip. Instead, they were beaten 1-5. They went to the locker room to the loud boos of disgruntled fans, and even before they noticed that several Canucks jerseys had landed on the ice of the almost sold-out Vancouver stadium.
“I’ve seen it in other arenas, but I never thought it would happen here or just for the team I coach,” Vancouver coach Bruce Boudreau said of the jerseys on the ice. “You don’t want to see something like that. It’s a complete embarrassment for us. I hope the players feel the same as I do.”
“Someone threw a jersey with my name on it last year and I’ll never forget it. It hurts you,” said team captain Bo Horvat. “Seeing it again now, it’s definitely uncomfortable.
“But I understand that the fans are frustrated. We didn’t give them much reason to be happy,” he continued. “We’ve been in a rebuilding phase for a lot of years and the way we’ve started this season, I feel like it’s never going to happen again. I mean we’re never going to start winning again.”
Jim Rutherford, who runs hockey operations in Vancouver, also chimed in. “I feel the same way as the fans and everyone else. It’s getting frustrating. It’s really hard to watch our performances,” he said.
After the mentioned Stanley Cup final, the Canucks played only 32 games in the playoffs, only New Jersey (29 duels) and Arizona (25) are worse off.
In the regular season, Vancouver has fared slightly better over those eleven years, posting a nearly 53 percent scoring success rate. However, it is still the eighth worst result in the league and the third worst behind Ottawa and Edmonton in Canada, where hockey players are under greater scrutiny.
But while Edmonton, thanks to the best player in the world, Connor McDavid, flew up and Ottawa bounced back from the bottom with one of the most promising teams, Vancouver’s growth is nowhere in sight.
The current team is not working and the young stars who could change everything are not on the way. The Canucks are league average in talent pool.
Vancouver fans would like to see a major change. In a poll by the regional newspaper The Province, 41 percent of them demand a major exchange. Another 36 percent lean towards a full-scale rebuild, which always involves the departure of some mainstays and grabbing talent at high draft positions.
On paper, the Canucks don’t look as bad as, say, Arizona. In addition to captain Horvat, they have Brock Boeser, JT Miller or Elias Pettersson in the attack. The defense is adorned by Oliver Ekman-Larsson and especially the productive Quinn Hughes, although he is currently in a slump. Goalkeeper Thatcher Demko also has a great reputation.
But according to behind-the-scenes sources, things are creaking in the cabin. “I hear there’s friction between some of the stars and the rest of the team. There’s a lot of isolated groups,” he declared TV pundit Colby Cohen. But he was not too surprised by that, because there has been speculation about the bad atmosphere in the Vancouver locker room for a long time.
“There is no smoke without fire,” former Canucks winger Jannik Hansen, who experienced the successful era of the Sedin brothers at the club, commented on the situation for the Sportsnet station. It culminated in the seventh final of the Stanley Cup in 2011 and finally ended in 2018, when Vancouver was already wading through the league’s basement.
