SEDINS CRAFTED RARE, WONDERFUL TALE IN VANCOUVER
Talented twins came into league together as Canucks and will leave the same way
Think about this for a moment.
The Sedins have been part of Vancouver, part of B.C., since 2000. Fans and media watched them arrive as franchise saviours, watched them struggle with the demands of playing in the NHL, watched them morph into superstars on the best Canucks team ever, watched them try to carry this franchise as everything around them fell apart, then watched them slide into their hockey dotage, quietly and gracefully, just as you’d expect.
That’s not a career. That’s an epic novel. They’ve been with us almost two decades, which means a generation of Canucks fans have been raised with the stories of the remarkable twins from Ornskoldsvik, Sweden — two men who came to represent the best of the game.
And now they’ve announced their retirement and it doesn’t seem possible. As long as they were here, we had a touchstone, a common reference point. Now that’s gone and suddenly things feel a little unhinged.
It’s not that the timing of this is a complete surprise. For the past number of months, there had been open speculation they were leaning this way. That didn’t exactly show up on the ice, where they remained productive players in a reduced role. But the Canucks are in a new phase with new young stars, which the team will be built around. There was a thought the twins would mentor that group. There was another thought their overwhelming presence in the locker-room might slow those young players’ development. As it turns out, the twins’ place on the team had little to do with their decision.
In the statement released Monday, the twins said it’s time to focus on family and life after hockey — and if you believe anything you read in the next couple of days, believe their families are at the centre of this.
“It’s time to help with the homework every night,” the statement read. “It’s time to be at every birthday party and stay in the cold at every hockey rink, soccer game and riding lesson on the weekends. It’s time to be at home for dinner every night.” Beautiful.
There’s no doubt they had help crafting their message, but there’s no doubt it came from their hearts, too.
The twins also said Vancouver has become home and they plan to be part of this community long after they retire. There’s something reassuring in that; that the affection and respect we gave the twins over the years will be, and has been, reciprocated.
What a story. For starters, they’re, you know, twins; two kids who grew up together, played together and became stars together in their hometown. That’s when they were still teenagers in Sweden.
If the story ends there and they go their separate ways in the NHL, it’s still a helluva yarn. But, through a remarkable set of circumstances too complicated to recreate here, then-Canucks GM Brian Burke took a topthree draft pick, sprinkled Bryan McCabe, other draft picks and some pixie dust on it, and turned it all into Henrik and Daniel.
They’ve always said they never expected to play together in the NHL. But this team gave them that chance and, after a shaky beginning, they evolved into the best Canucks ever.
If we’re to be honest, Pavel Bure remains the greatest talent to wear the jersey. But Bure was a supernova who burned out after seven seasons. With the twins, we saw the whole movie from start to end. What a production it was.
We know they played the game differently from everybody else. We know they were innovators — the slap pass is largely a Sedin creation, as is using the cycle to create offence. We also know, in their peak seasons, they were among the three or four best players in the world.
They had an instinct and creativity that you see in true genius.
Did we always appreciate it? Probably not. When things started to go bad — and I still maintain you can trace the starting point of the club’s downward slide to the cowardly elbow with which Chicago’s Duncan Keith concussed Daniel in 2011-12 — they bore a disproportionate amount of the responsibility. The problem, of course, lay elsewhere, and it remains a great failing of this organization that they burned through the Sedins’ best years without winning a Stanley Cup and the club couldn’t surround them with enough talent to keep their window open.
After this season, they will be gone. But their legacy will remain and it will be celebrated. Today we can start that celebration. Despite what you may be feeling, that makes this a good day.