WOE IS WILLIE
Coach does all he can: Cole
It was always going to come to this fork in the road for the Vancouver Canucks — and unlike Johnny Carson’s nerdy L.A. traffic-map guru Art Fern, there is no “stop, pick up the fork” option open to Trevor Linden and Jim Benning.
Fire Willie or blunder on? That was the morning poll question on Vancouver’s TSN radio affiliate Wednesday, with an added twist: “Should the Canucks fire Willie Desjardins today?” — meaning right this minute, after the head coach’s downtrodden lot surrendered six third-period goals to lose 8-6 to the Carolina Hurricanes on Tuesday night.
Counting my No vote, the poll sat at 71 per cent Hell Yes and 29 per cent Why Can’t We Fire Everybody?
For those in favour of hanging it on Willie, blowing a 5-2 lead by giving up six goals to one of the worst teams in the league was more than enough evidence that his team had quit. For those with slightly more Christmas spirit, maybe the troops were just fatigued at the end of a fivegames-in-eight-days roadie.
But since Desjardins is being fitted for the noose, it’s worth speculating what might have hap- pened had the message been different from the day he was hired.
Not saying this discussion wouldn’t have taken place anyway — an embarrassing collapse like Tuesday’s is apt to produce a visceral reaction from the subscribers — but the daily knee-jerk fluctuations might have been softened somewhat if ownership and management had taken a page from the Toronto Maple Leafs’ playbook — not the 1968-2014 playbook, but the one the Leafs unveiled when the new brain trust of Mike Babcock, Brendan Shanahan and (later) Lou Lamoriello decided full disclosure was the only way to go.
Babcock’s message: There will be pain. Prepare for some hard times as we build this thing.
Instead, the message Canucks president Linden, GM Benning and guilty-by-association owner Francesco Aquilini put out was stubbornly defiant: We need not tear it all down. We can contend while we build.
This put Desjardins on the spot because, as unfortunate as the John Tortorella era may have been, Torts was right in saying upon departure (and I paraphrase here): This team is old and slow and only going to get worse.
Now, the average sentient human being on the West Coast had to know this. But the message from management was equivocal. And the missed opportunity to speak plainly and honestly to the fans and deal with the reality has cost the Linden-Benning administration a considerable amount of goodwill and credibility and a couple of hockey seasons plagued by divided focus and false expectations.
Here’s what they could have said two years ago after the Tortorella fiasco, when Mike Gillis was also shown the door. Linden might not have looked like a diplomat, but the fans would have appreciated the candour:
“This wasn’t entirely John’s fault. As an organization, we have not been very good for some time. We have not scouted and drafted well, and there are no quick fixes for that. We have tried to get younger, but we have little secondary scoring behind Hank and Danny Sedin and we need to add skill — and the only way we can do that is to draft and develop and hope for that special player that tends to come only from near the top of the draft order.”
All right, maybe that would have been too candid for the market in which the Canucks operate. Toronto and Edmonton and Calgary stuck it out through decades of lousy teams and kept showing up at the rink. Not Vancouver, where bad teams equalled bad crowds before the Sedins hit their stride and after their inevitable downward slide, the team’s fortunes riding almost directly on their level of stupendousness.
Would the customers have stayed had Linden and Benning been more realistic? Hard to say. But empty seats are showing what they think of the fool’s paradise approach.
A few stats from the gifted Jeff Paterson: The Sedins had 63 points after 30 games last year. They have 39 to date this season, and yet they lead the team in scoring. In their 2010-11 Stanley Cup run season, the team allowed 58 third-period goals. They’ve already allowed 40 in 30 games. And finally: Last year, the lowestscoring team in Canucks history had 78 goals through 30 games. This team has 70, even after scoring six on Tuesday.
Feet to the fire, Desjardins might say the chances of winning with this lineup were never very good, but being a company man, he will not utter the following:
“I look down the bench and I see a pretty good second line with the Sedins and somebody, a passable third line with Bo Horvat and Jannik Hansen and maybe Brandon Sutter, and a couple of pretty darned ordinary fourth lines. No big-time first unit. So I have to play the heck out of Danny and Hank, and they should be playing less at their age, not more.
“And a couple of injuries on defence has exposed our lack of depth there, and if we don’t get incredible goaltending, we lose. Other than that, it’s all good.”
You’ll never hear it from him. And when the axe falls, it will be his head that it removes.
Empty seats are showing what fans think of the fool’s paradise approach.