GREAT CANUCK HOPE
As players reflect on a disappointing season and look ahead to next year, pressure mounts on young centre to take more of a leadership role
Give Bo Horvat a break. At least when it comes to who will be the next Vancouver Canucks captain. He’s got more pressing issues at hand. He has to save the franchise. Is that all? It’s remarkable to think about now. Horvat was drafted just four years ago and people hoped one day, many moons in the future, he’d be a good, two-way centre. It was code for in a good year in his prime, this guy may get more than 40 points.
He’s 22 years old and has already done it twice. The second was most impressive. Horvat went the final 17 games of the season without a goal. He still led the Canucks in points and goals. That’s both representative of how good his season was and how bad it went for the Canucks.
What would have come off as hyperbolic and bizarre seven months ago now seems lucid and entirely defendable. Horvat is the Canucks’ best player. You can quibble over whether it’s technically true at this moment and it’s probably not, but on this there is no debate:
The Canucks need Horvat to be great. Like first-line centre great. And they need it to happen soon. No pressure, right? Give Horvat this: He has the right makeup to handle it. He has embraced this hockey market and all its quirks. A restricted free agent, he’s hopeful he can sign long term.
“Everything about this city, I love it,” Horvat said. “To know I’m going to be here for a while would be awesome.”
Horvat obsesses about the sport and improving. In the last miserable run of games, which played out like a raging warehouse fire you had to let burn itself out, he wasn’t spending his off days thinking about hitting up Bonnaroo or Coachella. He was developing an off-season plan, mapping out how he was going to get faster, especially in his east-west strides, and how he was going to score more. And, boy, do the Canucks ever need that.
For now, Horvat is the most important player in the Canucks’ rebuild. The Canucks need him to be an offensive difference maker.
What they don’t need to do is add any pressure on him by putting him into a situation where at 22 he’s replacing a legend, Henrik Sedin, as captain, especially when that legend is still on the team.
“He’s done so much for this organization and for me to come in and take that from him, I wouldn’t feel comfortable, I don’t think,” Horvat said. “I will still try to be a leader. I will still try to help the team that way.
“But to take the captaincy away from him? I don’t think I could do it.”
Horvat already possesses a natural ability to say and do the right things and it’s a big reason why so many think he should be the next captain.
But that needs to wait. He needs time still to fit comfortably into the NHL, figure out how to handle losses and what to say after them, too, because in Vancouver being accountable is one of the most difficult things about the job.
The youngest captain in the league is Connor McDavid, but he’s also the best player in the NHL, a marvellous talent so good he could get this Canucks team into the playoffs.
Most of the other captains in the league range from their mid-20s to 30s. The only other young captain is 24-year-old Gabriel Landeskog in Colorado, but modelling your team on the Avalanche is the equivalent of modelling your public relations department on Sean Spicer.
Horvat said Tuesday he sees a path to being a first-line centre in the NHL and given the number of people he has already proven wrong, he deserves the benefit of the doubt.
It won’t be easy. Teams started playing Horvat differently as the year went on, something that began in earnest after his all-star appearance and intensified when Markus Granlund was hurt for the season, which essentially vaporized the Sedins.
So the season that started with Horvat being used to shut top lines down ended with the league’s best defensive players game-planning for him.
“It’s crazy how it flipped,” Horvat said. “It seemed like every time I was put out there on the road, their best D pairing would come out and try to shut me down.”
The All-Star Game was really the coming-out party for Horvat.
“You could see a difference on the ice,” Horvat said. “The allstars from other teams started talking to me on the ice.
“There was a certain respect in it and as a young guy, seeing that happen to me was pretty cool.”
“But to take the captaincy away from him (Henrik Sedin)? I don’t think I could do it.” — Bo Horvat