Kesler flap much ado about almost nothing
If you wondered what it sounds like when a coach really throws a player under the bus, we refer you to Winnipeg head coach Claude Noel’s comments about Evander Kane.
“I wasn’t happy with the way he started the game,” Noel said after he benched Kane during a loss to the Bruins last week. “Are you going to play or are you not? Figure it out . . . I saw two or three shifts and I’d seen enough. Like, what do you want to do here?
“If you want to be a key player on our team, if that’s what you think you want to be, then get ready to play the game like everybody else.”
Now that’s a case of a coach throwing a player under the bus.
Whatever the thing is between Alain Vigneault and Ryan Kesler is not.
Kesler, as you may be aware, clogged the airwaves and the Twitter-verse on Monday when he reacted to a day-old quote from Vigneault over his recent struggles.
Following the Canucks’ 4-2 loss to the Ducks on Sunday, a game in which Kesler was as visible as a marshmallow in a snowbank, Vigneault was asked about the Selke Trophy winner and said, in the gentlest way possible, that Kesler might use the players around him to better advantage.
He then added that to single out Kesler was unfair on a night when the whole team stunk on ice.
Kesler, just so you know, has one assist in his last eight games. The point about using his teammates, therefore, wasn’t exactly a blinding revelation.
Ah, but it was something out of the ordinary, and this being Vancouver, the first question put to Kesler in Monday’s scrum concerned Vigneault’s comments.
Now, 95 per cent of the players in the NHL would have answered something along the lines of, “I’m trying to work my way out of this,” or “I have to play better.”
That, in fact, was Kane’s response to his coach’s considerably more pointed comments. But Kesler, who wears a chip on his shoulder like a badge of honour, didn’t take the easy way out and he’s now turned a nothing story into one of those tiring Canucks’ miniseries.
You know how this is going to go. The words were barely out of Kesler’s mouth — “I don’t know what he means by that” and “If he wants to come and talk to me he’s more than welcome” — when it started to sprout arms and legs.
Clearly, this was a sign of a rift between the player and the coach. Clearly, this was a sign of a troubled locker room. For context, the threeyear-old clash between Vigneault and Willie Mitchell was pulled out of the archives and the story will be framed and reframed a couple more times before the cycle runs out.
Who knows? By then, Kesler might even have another assist.
Look, we understand we’re contributing to that cycle by reacting to a reaction. But this isn’t about Kesler and Vigneault so much as it’s about this market and the way the Canucks are covered.
The issue, of course, isn’t quantity. The issue is the coverage is a mile wide and an inch deep.
There are any number of reasons for that and we don’t have the space to explore them all. But whatever used to pass for a thoughtful discourse on the team and the league has been replaced by an immature, knee-jerk reaction to anything that occurs outside the carefully managed team bubble.
In this environment, non-stories become stories and the unimportant becomes important. In this environment, meaningful responses to legitimate questions are discouraged because players have seen what awaits if they go off-script.
The loser is the fan who is served up gruel by the bucketful. At least you hope they understand what’s being served to them. There are days you wonder.
It’s likely that Kesler was just having a bad day on Monday. OK, he has a lot of bad days. But if he really believes Vigneault was singling him out or trying to send him a message, he’s just flat-out wrong
You hope that would kill this story. But you also know there’s little chance of that.