Canucks managing damage control well
VANCOUVER — As hockey crises go, the Vancouver Canucks’ current downward spiral pales next to the protracted sufferings of teams that have much more experience at being the punch lines of sadistic jokes.
Buffalo, Florida, Columbus, the Islanders, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto ... these are franchises that have endured extended Dark Periods and many (not the Leafs, of course) have had to grovel repeatedly before the customers, with varying degrees of success.
The Canucks? It’s not as though they’ve never trodden this ground before — you don’t go 42 Stanley Cupless seasons without hearing about it from the many-headed — but they have mostly kept the critics at bay for the past decade or so with teams that were always respectable and frequently excellent ... if never quite, you know, excellent enough.
Even at their peak, say 2010-12, they were never Canada’s Team, but they were our country’s best team until just recently and they have raked in untold millions in profits during that run, which is how a merit system is supposed to work.
So how are they doing at managing the present crisis, unaccustomed as they are to damage control?
All things considered, pretty nicely.
Fear, apparently, is a powerful motivator.
Like a well-rehearsed tag team, head coach John Tortorella and general manager Mike Gillis each held a mea culpa day — well, Tortorella’s on Tuesday was mea culpa, Gillis’ scrum in Florida a day later was more like wea culpa — and with admirable restraint, both fielded questions that in more prosperous days would have sent their respective blood pressures through the ceiling.
It’s amazing how two guys who never suffered fools gladly in fat times have bitten their tongues and swallowed the bile since the season went sideways.
So how to interpret this unflappable calm, this rattle-proof patience, this refusal to roll the eyes or be snappish under cross-examination? Think circus acrobats. The high wire. One more false step, like the 6-1 Dallas surrender or the 7-4 collapse against the Islanders and — whoops! — there goes poor old John and maybe GMMG landing on top of him.
Better to keep one’s head — and rhetoric — down and hope the storm passes.
Tortorella’s foothold is more precarious by far, not only because of his ill-advised charge on the Calgary Flames’ dressing room in January (though Gillis indirectly referenced it Wednesday as a “hard to describe” turning point), but because it looks very much as though his players have hit the Tortorella Wall already, not yet a year in.
The coach betrayed no hint of this Tuesday when he strode into the media room from practice, still in his skates, to address the latest fiasco, but he must know there’s an unhealthy level of unrest among his team’s leaders. Or maybe not.
“I think we have a good relationship, the players and I,” he said. “It isn’t that complicated of a guy that they’re dealing with here. It’s pretty much straightforward and I think we understand one another.”
He spoke of open discussions, needing the players’ input because it is a veteran group. If it was all a fib, it was a whopper.
“I think we all know, coaching staff and players, that we have to be even tighter now to get through this.”
But even if the players somehow find it in themselves to rally and sneak into the playoffs — as long a shot as that is — it’s probably a fantasy to think that the season ticket holders will re-up for four more years of the kind of mediocre (gusting to unwatchable) hockey the Canucks have played under Tortorella.
Gillis’ scrum with reporters outside the general managers’ meetings in Boca Raton on Wednesday was smoother than Sammy Davis Jr. doing Mr. Bojangles’ old soft shoe. The usually dyspeptic GM outdid even Tortorella’s Zen-like state.
But really, what is the alternative for either of them?
Is Tortorella supposed to say, “I’ve lost the room and we’ve got no chance?”
Is Gillis supposed to say, “We’ll play out the season with Torts, because you don’t fire a guy this late in a lost cause. But if you know of any good head coaching candidates out there, here’s my home number?”
What the GM said instead was: “From top to bottom, our whole team has underperformed. It isn’t because of a lack of effort, it isn’t because of a lack of caring. It’s just we’ve had a very tough year for a lot of different reasons and we have a slight opportunity to try and right that ship, and we’re going to try and do it by rallying behind them and rallying behind our coaching staff.”
He wouldn’t come right out with a vote of confidence for Tortorella because he’s fighting to keep his own job — safe from the chop, probably, only because the Aquilini family is never going to pay a reported $16 million for both a GM and a coach to go away with four years left on each one’s contract.
But Gillis may have to fire Tortorella, his second coaching dismissal in as many years, for the sake of selfpreservation.
It may also, coincidentally, be in the team’s best interest.
But only if he chooses the right person to be the Canucks’ next coach, assuming it’s his choice to make. And that might be a bad assumption.