RUTHERFORD'S VISION FOR CANUCKS WILL TAKE SOME TIME TO EXECUTE
With hobbled team off to another bad start, president preaches, asks for a little patience
You can't fire a coach who is one win away from reaching 600. But Bruce Boudreau might want to hurry up and hit the milestone already.
The way things are going for the Vancouver Canucks' head coach, he might not get many more chances at it. Something has to give when you start the season 0-5-2. And unfortunately for Boudreau, who took over from Travis Green last December after a similarly ugly 8-15-2 start, the easiest thing might be canning the coach.
“There's been a number of tough years in Vancouver. Everyone's frustrated,” Canucks president Jim Rutherford said. “Certainly when you have a record like we do, sometimes you get put in a position that you don't want to be in.”
That doesn't mean Rutherford will make Boudreau a scapegoat for all that has gone wrong so far this season. After all, we all knew the Canucks weren't going to challenge for a Stanley Cup this season. But after Boudreau went 32-15-10 last year — a 106-point pace — the hope was that they would challenge for a playoff spot. At the very least, they should be competitive — not setting records for blown multigoal leads or getting blown out by the Buffalo Sabres. Or playing so poorly that a fans were tossing jerseys and booing the team off the ice in the home opener.
Can you blame them?
This is the worst start in the franchise's history. The Canucks are the only team in the NHL without a win. And that's in a league where Arizona, Chicago and others are trying to tank for a chance at drafting top prospects.
“I don't want to say I'm not surprised what's happened here,” Rutherford said. “I am surprised that we haven't won a game at this point, but I'm not totally surprised at what's going on.”
Rutherford isn't surprised, because he saw this coming. Injuries to defencemen Quinn Hughes and Riley Stillman are a part of it. But heading into the season, something just wasn't right with this team. It's not anything that Rutherford can put his finger on. But when you've been in management for as long as he has, you just know.
It goes back to the pre-season, when the team won just two of seven games.
“If you finish your camp and you don't really think about (the record), then your camp's probably been OK,” Rutherford said.
“But when camp is done and you start thinking about different things, like how the camp went from a team point of view, then you're in trouble. I can certainly say our camp wasn't as good as we'd like it to have been. And now it's carried over into the regular season.”
To be honest, it goes back even further. Back to when Rutherford was hired last December, four days after Boudreau came on board.
Rutherford knew back then what he was walking into. This wasn't like Ken Holland taking over the Edmonton Oilers. The Canucks were not one or two players away from contending for a championship. This was a rebuild. Or a retool. Or the kind of situation in which no team wants to find themselves in the salary cap era — not good enough to compete for a Cup, but also not bad enough to land a draft lottery pick.
“We're a team that's missed the playoffs for a long time, so we're rebuilding it on the fly is what we're trying to do,” Rutherford said.
“Add a player here, add a player there and try to add players that aren't going to be with us for just a year, but who are hopefully still going to be here once it all comes together in a year or two.”
Last summer, Rutherford signed winger Ilya Mikheyev to a four-year deal with a Us$4.75-million cap hit (a raise from the $1.645 million he was making in Toronto) and convinced J.T. Miller to re-sign for eight more years at a team-high $8 million. He would have liked to have done more. But with Oliver Ekman-larsson and Tyler Myers eating up more than $13 million in cap space, his hands were tied.
Still, Rutherford believes the team he assembled is better than what it has shown so far.
“When we're healthy, we have enough players to compete for a playoff spot,” Rutherford said. “We don't have to give up that hope at this point in time. That would be premature.
“I feel that I have a pretty good understanding of what all is going on here,” Rutherford said. “But in today's world of sports, certainly hockey, it never gets fixed as quickly as fans would like.
“We would like to fix it today, but that's not possible.
“It takes time. And there's going to be some setbacks and some bumps in the road. But we will get this right at some point. Just maybe not as soon as everybody would like.”