Stecher a stretch to make roster W
Despite top-star billing, local boy needs to keep repeating Wednesday’s performance
ith the game over, Troy Stecher was leaving the ice, having just been named first star.
His brother was draped over a rail, hovering over the Canucks tunnel to the locker-room, a spot he had raced down to when the game had wrapped up. With his phone, he was filming Stecher’s exit.
“He was screaming how proud he was,” Stecher said.
It was an emotional moment and a wonderful one for a kid who grew up here.
But if Stecher’s goal is to make this team — and it is — it really meant nothing. Unless he can do it again. And again. And again.
Yes, Ben Hutton did the implausible last year, hiking from Camp Nowhere to the Canucks top six on opening night.
But the odds remain incredibly long. A year ago, it took four pre-season games before head coach Willie Desjardins started believing Hutton was going to make it.
“I’d say that’s rare,” Desjardins said. “I think it was after his third pre-season game, because I thought he was our best defenceman in every one of those games.
“(In his fourth), we thought, ‘OK, now we’re going into a real tough game. He’s going to fall off here.’
“And he didn’t fall off. Then he had the next game and we thought, ‘He’s not going to do it again.’ “He did.” Stecher’s story from Wednesday’s 5-3 pre-season win over the Oilers is a great one. Growing up, his dad’s company had season tickets. As a kid, he had a No. 10 Canucks Pavel Bure jersey, but with “Stecher” on the back. His favourite jersey is his most nostalgic, the Canucks maroon gradient one with the Orca. He tapes his stick just like Todd Bertuzzi did, with the tape running way down the shaft.
So what happens when a 22-yearold from Richmond, with a childhood immersed in Canucks lore, scores a goal in the first period of his first-ever game in Rogers Arena?
“Honestly, I kind of blacked out,” Stecher said.
Stecher left the ice Wednesday with three points and all them were on did-you-just-see-that plays. It had the city’s hockey fans swooning, which is as much about Stecher as it is our collective hunger in Vancouver for any morsel of on-ice excitement.
Generally, in this city, resisting pre-season hype is futile. Even for the coaches.
There was the year Sergei Shirokov led the Canucks in pre-season scoring. He started the year on Alain Vigneault’s No. 1 power-play unit with the Sedins. Three days later, he was a defenceman in practice. Not long after, he was gone.
There was 2007, when Mason Raymond and Ryan Shannon were electric in pre-season. Raymond started the year with the Sedins at even strength. Shannon was with the twins on the power play. By the second week of the season, both were in the minors.
In truth, there isn’t much to read into in the first few pre-season games, meaning Stecher still has much to do if he has any hope of convincing the Canucks to upend their plans.
If you include Nikita Tryamkin, Andrey Pedan and Alex Biega along with the presumed top six, Stecher started training camp behind at least nine defencemen.
He has to beat out two of them. Complicating things, Tryamkin has an out clause if his contract is cut and Pedan would require waivers. So too would Biega, but there’s a solid chance he would clear, given his two-year contract.
From any angle, however, it still looks to be improbable that Stecher starts the season here.
“(Wednesday) night, I was on Cloud 9 afterwards,” Stecher said. “But I woke up.
“I know one game doesn’t earn you a spot. I’m not too high. I see I played well, but there’s definitely some improvements in the defensive zone I could have made and some reads in the neutral zone which I’m going to look at. “It’s a long journey.” Helping the rookie, however, is he’s trying to do this at 22 years old and not, say, 19.
Three years ago, he admitted, he wouldn’t have been ready for this.
“Not at all. My 19-year-old year was my first year at college,” Stecher said of his time with the University of North Dakota. “I was our fifth defenceman there. I played a limited role. “I wasn’t a key player that year.” He sure was Wednesday and that was with the Canucks. Now he just has to repeat that performance.