TWO OF A KIND
Henrik and Daniel Sedin leave the game healthy and content, and with no regrets
Henrik, left, and Daniel Sedin never got their hands on a Stanley Cup in 18 seasons with the Canucks, but they were embraced by Vancouver fans on and off the ice. The retiring brothers, who never sought the spotlight, were given a Hollywood-style farewell last night. In fact, Rogers Arena had a Twin-seltown feel to it.
Before each Canucks practice, Travis Green holds a video session that he refers to as a “teaching moment.”
On Thursday, a fairly significant day for the NHL team, the Vancouver coach played a highlight reel of Daniel and Henrik Sedin’s career. This is what he wanted to teach his younger players.
“Everyone sees the finished product here, the Hall of Fame players,” the Canucks’ coach said. “We talked to our group about it. These two guys went through a lot. It was tough on them early in their careers. (Former Canucks head coach Marc Crawford) made them into great players, but he was hard on them. The league was hard on them. They went through a lot physically. It was a harder game, a different kind of hockey.
“As young players in the league, they had to persevere. To see what they’ve become is a real good lesson for our younger players.”
A lesson for anyone, really. As the curtain closes on the Sedins’ careers, there are liter- ally 100 entry and exit points to their story, all of them poignant, all of them a powerful reminder of what they leave behind. But when I think about the twins — and that’s been a full-time job this week — I don’t think about those moments so much as I think about the totality of their career.
In mythology, there is supposed to be 12 stages to a hero’s journey — 12 stages in which they’re tested and challenged before they come out the other side, transformed.
The twins might not have experienced all 12 stages, but when I think about the movie that’s been running through my mind these last couple of days, I think about their journey, how they came to us, how they changed, and now, how they leave.
“We’ve talked about our team taking it in, but the city is taking it in, as well,” said Green. “These kind of things don’t happen very often.”
No they don’t, so roll film. The first column I wrote about the Sedins was back in 1999 at the world juniors in Winnipeg, when their Swedish team met Canada in the tournament semifinal. The buzz had just started about the twins, who were lighting it up as 18-year-olds with Modo.
I talked to both — you can imagine how quotable they were at that stage — and with their father Tommy in the stands in Winnipeg, then watched them get drilled by a Canadian team that featured Roberto Luongo in goal.
That will be the last I’ll see of them, I thought.
Canucks GM Brian Burke had other plans. At the draft in Boston, Burke struck a deal for the ages, engineering a series of trades that left the Canucks with both Sedins, who had just been named co-players of the year in Sweden.
My take? This was the biggest trade in Canucks history. The problem was, they were illprepared physically for the grind of the NHL, and they spent their first three years getting pounded like a nail.
Derian Hatcher, wherever you are, you owe these two an apology.
This was the age of the famous Sedin drinking game — every time a Sedin falls down, you drink. It was also a time they considered returning to Sweden, but were encouraged to stick it out by some of the Canucks’ veterans, most notably Markus Naslund and Trevor Linden, now the team president.
Somewhere in there I wrote how, maybe if they worked at their games, they could become effective second-line players like, ahem, Michael Nylander. Nailed another one!
You know what happened next. They returned from the 2005-06 lockout as men and started an eight-year run of magic in our city.
The numbers tell one story. Your memory tells you another.
The plays they made, the outof-nowhere passes, the sheer joy they brought to the rink most every night, whether their linemates were Jason King, Anson Carter or Alex Burrows.
Daniel was asked yesterday if they ever had a winger they had a hard time playing with.
“We had (Wade) Brookbank for a while,” he said.
Brookbank scored three goals in 52 games over two seasons with the Canucks. We know who to blame there.
It wasn’t always unicorns and gumdrops, of course. The twins were rightly carved after pulling a no-show against Anaheim in a 2007 playoff series. Two years later, at the draft in Ottawa, I wrote a column under the headline: “Sedins trade far from unthinkable.”
The twins had one year left on their contracts that paid, wait for it, $3.575 million annually, and new GM Mike Gillis had publicly questioned if they were elite players at his first news conference.
“Based on everything I’ve read the last couple of months, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re (moved),” their agent J.P. Barry said at the time.
Two years later, Henrik won the Art Ross and Hart trophies.
Those were the best-ever Canucks teams and they were more entertaining than a Bruce Springsteen show. But for all they accomplished in those years, my enduring image of the twins is the two of them in the Canucks’ locker-room after Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final in 2011, absolutely gutted but still standing up for their teammates while the majority of them hid.
We learned something about the twins in their moments of triumph. We learned more about them in that moment of defeat.
From that point the years would unfurl. There were a couple more good years before things went sour. The twins enjoyed a renaissance under former coach Willie Desjardins four years ago, but failed in the playoffs.
The last three years, well, you know about them, just as you know this year registers as a minor triumph for the Sedins. And now they walk away. Over the last 19 years I’ve written more than 200 columns, something in the neighbourhood of 170,000 words, in which the twins were the primary subject. Some were critical, especially in those early years. Most were florid in their praise.
But it’s funny. I’ve interviewed them in Turin, in Shanghai and Beijing, in virtually every NHL city. I interviewed Daniel in Sochi. Yet, I can’t really say I know them.
The most detailed conversation I ever had with a Sedin came at a restaurant on the west side when Daniel and his wife, Marinette, sat beside my wife and I.
My wife’s an educator and she and Daniel chatted away amicably for 20 minutes about schools, about learning, about kids. There wasn’t a word about hockey. When they left, my wife turned to me and asked, “Who’s that again?”
In all those years, in fact, the twins never once betrayed that anything being written or said about them made any impact. And maybe that’s the point.
While we were trying to define them or reveal some greater truth about them, their attention was focused elsewhere — on their families, on their craft, on the very serious business of trying to get better.
As their coach said, there’s a lesson there.
After his scrum on Thursday, I took Henrik aside and asked if he ever read a word I’d written, or anyone else had written, in his time here.
“The good stuff, anyway,” he said.
Funny guy.
“We read the good and the bad,” he said. “The bad comes with the territory and you just try to soak up the good.”
This week it’s all been the good stuff, but what else could it be?