Willie Desjardins says he wants to remain as coach next year
COACH ON HOT SEAT Team president Trevor Linden failed to give his bench boss a ringing endorsement, but Desjardins wants to stick around and point the NHL squad in the right direction
Willie Desjardins is not ready to leave the Vancouver Canucks. Whether the Canucks are ready to leave him remains to be seen.
A year ago, almost to the day, Canucks president Trevor Linden emphatically backed his head coach, promised he’d return and even chided anyone who dared question his decision.
This week, Linden was far less absolute when asked on TSN 1040’s morning radio show if this is it for Desjardins in Vancouver. His response? Essentially, we’ll see.
Desjardins was quizzed about all of this Wednesday and mid-question his face started flickering with a “here we go” gleam. He knew the question was coming. He also knew exactly what Linden had said.
“I think it always matters to you, how can it not matter?” Desjardins said. “That’s your job you’re looking at. But I can’t control that. I can control what I do with the team.
“The organization always has to look at things, they just have to.”
When he said it’s a job “you’re looking at,” he’s not exaggerating. Desjardins may have the most watched job in the Lower Mainland these days. It’s not without reason.
The Canucks’ special teams have been agonizingly impotent and shockingly uninventive, steadily maintaining a bottom-six ranking in both the power play and the penalty kill. That doesn’t seem good.
There’s been a long list of curious deployment calls, perfectly summed up by juxtaposing his tendency to give Jayson Megna all the ice time with his affection for benching Nikolay Goldobin, who is far younger with far more electricity.
Overall, last year’s Canucks were reviewed as a disaster. Desjardins even said he still thinks about how poorly that team performed. Thing is, this year’s Canucks have the same number of points (64) after the same number of games (66) which sure doesn’t howl improvement.
But in recent days, Desjardins has at times made a persuasive case of why he should be back, continuing to point out how hard his team has competed and how he got a lot out of a handful of Vancouver’s youngest players by making them “earn” their ice time.
“There are so many ways to look at a job, what a person’s done and where they’re at,” Desjardins said. “To me, it’s sticking up for your players, battling for your players.
“And it’s finding a way to get the best of them and that’s what I do and that’s what I want to continue doing. If it’s not a fit, then it’s not a fit. But that doesn’t change how I go about doing it.”
The players really like Desjardins. He’s personable and caring. There isn’t a player on the team he doesn’t know something about from their personal life. He’s fiercely loyal — sometimes to a fault — to his veterans and that could be why they regularly put in the effort even on a team that never really had a chance.
And often enough, Desjardins is open to giving opportunity to his youngest players.
With those youngest players, he has arguably had his biggest successes. Bo Horvat, Sven Baertschi and Markus Granlund are all contributing offensive players and they all developed on Desjardins’ watch.
“I am thankful he’s been my coach,” Baertschi said. “With me, he was really patient at the start. I was not playing my best hockey, but he was patient with me. He knew what my potential was. He just stuck with it and he stayed with me.”
You could make a case that Desjardins was most let down this season by the players most out of his control. The Sedins and veterans the current management group brought in, including Loui Eriksson, Brandon Sutter, Luca Sbisa and Erik Gudbranson, when he was healthy, all flopped to varying degrees.
Say this for Desjardins, he has the right attitude for a coach in charge of a ragtag roster like this one.
“Winning is important to me, I think about it a lot,” Desjardins said. “I’m excited when we win.
“But more important is how we compete. I can walk away from a game if we’ve competed hard and lose. If you give the best you have and lose, that’s all you can do . ... I couldn’t live with last season. It was just a bad season. I didn’t feel good when we left the rink.
“This season, there have been some games where we haven’t played our best, but a lot of times some of our players just don’t have the energy they need. That’s usually why we have been able to play the way we want.”