Mid-season funk sank Canucks’ year
Tortorella cites organization’s lack of depth
An old football coach, trying to explain the pressure his team was under, once used the following delicate phrase:
“They’re so tight, you couldn’t drive an inflating pin up their (butts) with a jackhammer.” Evocative, no? This was the state of the Vancouver Canucks in January and February, going into and coming out of the Olympic break. Beset by jitters, pressure, bad luck and injuries that led to too much ice time for the survivors, many of whom were in over their heads, theirs was a black hole that drew more and more of the troops into its vortex, dragging down even the best of them.
From Dec.30 until March 6, John Tortorella’s team played 25 games and lost 20 of them, and at the end of that ordeal, the Canucks were, in every sense but mathematical, done for the season. Repeat: Done. And from the moment that fact became plain to all but the most delusional of loyalists, anything this team did the rest of the way should have been viewed with extreme suspicion.
That includes now, this confusing period in which the Canucks have won four out of seven, a thing that might be worth getting excited about if it happened, say, in the first round of the playoffs.
But barring some cataclysmic occurrence in the cosmos, there aren’t going to be any playoffs for Vancouver.
So along with the occasional fist-pump when the Canucks manage to subdue a juggernaut like the Calgary Flames or Winnipeg Jets or Florida Panthers or Nashville Predators — their net earnings from the past two weeks — a savvy sports town would be well-advised to listen to the alarm bells ringing insistently in the background.
It’s coming up on April Fool’s Day. This is Fool’s Gold time in the National Hockey League season. And nobody, from owner Francesco Aquilini to the most fervent fan, wants to be among those getting snookered.
In other words, it might pay to hold onto to a bit of skepticism of all the rediscovered hands ever since the Canucks essentially played their way out of the first division. Suddenly, no one’s squeezing the sticks into sawdust, victims of long droughts (Alex Burrows) have sprung to life, rookies (Nicklas Jensen) and heretofore extras (Shawn Matthias) have injected newfound energy into a sagging team and the captain, Henrik Sedin, is standing up in the dressing room to say: “We’re still in the race.”
And good on him, and them, for refusing to give up.
But everyone can name a team that lost all hope and then suddenly started to freewheel. The Leafs, to cite but one, did it for years — play just well enough after they’d been eliminated to lose a good position in the entry draft.
Teams win down the stretch, players save their jobs, maybe save their coaches’ jobs, and then turn out to have all the same old problems when they tee it up for the following season.
That’s not to say opponents aren’t trying against the Canucks. Nobody is curling up in the fetal position and saying: “Go ahead, score.” But none of the teams they’ve beaten in this recent stretch have been playoff teams, and the one they face here Sunday, Buffalo, is dead last out of 30 teams.
So it’s important, on that day when the Canucks’ reality is finally backed up by the arithmetic, not to place too much faith in what we’re seeing and hearing now, or the rest of the way.
It might provide some clues, but it’s not the final answer.
Tortorella went on Vancouver radio Friday and gave a remarkably candid, 15-minute interview. Show hosts Jake Edwards and Dave Pratt asked the right questions, and Tortorella — who’s been unfailingly polite and responsive all season — handled them all with aplomb.
GM Mike Gillis was similarly impressive outside the league meetings in Florida last week. Everything they say sounds eminently reasonable.
Injuries to the top players, Tortorella said, were no excuse, “but as an organization we haven’t been able to absorb them with our depth.” Who can argue? Burrows, both Sedins, Alex Edler, Chris Tanev, now Ryan Kesler ... it’s been a long list of casualties.
The criticism, the calls for his head on a platter, and/or Gillis’s?
“This is part of the business. I love it here. I love the scrutiny. I wish it could be more positive, but listen, we make our own bed. When you’re not winning, it’s going to go the other way,” Tortorella said. “Is it fun when it’s going off the rails a bit? No, but we gotta have some (thick) skin here.”
Gillis hasn’t come out with a vote of confidence in Tortorella, so the coach wouldn’t hazard a guess as to his own future.
“You’re asking the wrong guy,” he said. “Do I want to be here? Absolutely. I like the guys. I think we made the right decision as far as trying to re-tool this team.
“But I am not going to make decisions to try to keep my job. I’m going to make decisions for what I think is best for the hockey club and if Francesco and his family or Mike deem those decisions are wrong, they will show me the door.”
Having gone off the rails, himself, charging the Calgary dressing room in midJanuary after Flames coach Bob Hartley iced his enforcers for the opening faceoff, Tortorella has already explained himself adequately on that front.
Calling it a “huge mistake” on Friday, he added: “As my good friend Jim Schoenfeld always told me, ‘Everybody has rats in their basement.’ And I am trying to distil my rats. But the rats crawled out of the basement that night, and I regret it.”
The idea that he may regret it while still employed in Vancouver next year is one of many imponderables facing ownership. The hockey he wants the Canucks to play, and which they have played successfully in stretches this season, is not attractive, and it’s nothing like the style Gillis had in mind when he took over as GM six seasons ago.
But the game has changed, and Gillis has known it for a while. The old way wasn’t good enough, and if the new way is better, it hasn’t given much evidence of it. Can they blame it on injuries, and a coach briefly losing his mind, and sell the fans on a hope for better days ahead?
Which team was real: the one that couldn’t get out of its own way for two long months, or the one that just about ran the table in December and showed this spasm of life again, too late to matter?
Ultimately, it’s the Aquilinis’ call. Tough one.