WHO LEADS THE PACK?
Canucks put their skills to the test
With the Yuletide season now upon us, here are the holly and jolly Monday morning musings and meditations on the world of sports:
Back in a time when you could have meaningful conversations with the people you cover, thenCalgary Flames coach Darryl Sutter riffed on the concept of leadership.
Sutter said the locker-room, not management or coaches, determines the team’s leaders. It doesn’t matter if the player is wearing a letter. Everyone in that room knows who to follow.
Which brings us around to Bo Horvat. Horvat is the captain of the Vancouver Canucks.
The fact he doesn’t wear the
C is immaterial. He plays like the captain. He carries himself like the captain. He talks like the captain.
The way he’s performing during the Canucks’ most recent troubles only reinforces his standing on the team. He’s playing more than 20 minutes a night. He takes every conceivable faceoff. His wingers are, basically, Anthony Scaramucci and Robert Mueller, but he still leads the Canucks in scoring.
The organization, in fact, has been derelict in not providing Horvat with someone, anyone, who can complement his skill set. This is the same organization that leans on him to an absurd extent, but has yet to acknowledge what everyone already knows.
Still not sure what the reasoning is there. Hockey men talk about the need for structure and definition on a young team and the Canucks have the ideal player to lead them in uncertain times.
We had some fun with the William Nylander watch — mostly because taking the urine out of Toronto is the birthright of every Canadian — but that negotiation will have consequences for virtually every NHL team, including the Canucks.
Nylander was the first of the restricted free agents who will reshape the landscape in the salary-cap world. Those players represent some of the game’s great young talents, everyone from Mikko Rantanen, the NHL’s leading scorer, to Patrik Laine, the leading goal-scorer, to emerging Leafs stars Mitch Marner and Auston Matthews, to franchise-building-blocks Matthew Tkachuk, Sebastian Aho and Brayden Point. Brock Boeser is also in the mix. His resumé isn’t quite as complete as those of most of his colleagues but, in 87 career games, he has 39 goals and 73 points. On a per-game average, both are higher than Nylander’s totals over 185 games.
Yes, there’s a season to play out here, but Boeser’s camp will look at Nylander’s six-year, US$45-million deal and figure that’s a good place to start.
Echo the sentiments of colleague Ken Campbell on the latest incident involving the Capitals’ Tom Wilson. On Friday, Wilson was assessed a match penalty for a late, blindside headshot on the Devils’ Brett Seney.
This, we remind you, is a player who’s been suspended four times in the past 105 games and was coming off a 20-game suspension, and the NHL deemed his latest offence wasn’t worthy of supplemental discipline. Me confused.
Couple Wilson’s rap sheet with a match penalty and there has to be an action from the league unless, of course, they still don’t have a handle on this whole brain-injury thing and protecting their players. Yes, upon further review, that might be the case.
Interesting parallels between the firing of Ron Hextall in Philly this past week and the Canucks’ Trevor Linden this summer.
Both favoured a patient, methodical rebuild. Both felt they were making progress, even if that progress wasn’t reflected in the standings. And both thought they had the support of ownership and were blindsided by their dismissal.
History will be the ultimate judge in both cases, but, here and now, the table is set for the next guy in Philly. Hextall was building something. He just won’t be around to see its conclusion.
Finally, if you were wondering what makes Pete Carroll great, we refer you to his comments about Richard Sherman, who returned to Seattle with the 49ers on Sunday after burning a few bridges on his way out of town.
“It was a challenge in being really willing to work with somebody and see the beautiful aspects of this individual,” Carroll said before the Seahawks’ win. “(Sherman) is an amazing person. I had great respect for him. I was challenged because he was brilliant. He had a lot of thoughts and this tremendous competitiveness about him that took him places that some other athletes don’t get to.
“He pushes the boundaries because he sees beyond what a lot of people see.”
That also describes Carroll. Sherman tends to make things about Sherman and he’d scare off a lot of other coaches.
In Seattle, however, he fit right in with a collection of strong personalities.
Carroll, in turn, gave those personalities room to express themselves, to play and act freely, and that came to define the Seahawks. It didn’t always work and there was friction in the later years. But Carroll also won one championship and came within one bad-play call of winning another with his misfits.
Sherman epitomized that team. Ken Griffey Jr. occupies a unique place in Seattle sports lore and Edgar Martinez likely slides into a second spot.
But Sherman is right there in the next group. He and his teammates created something that will be remembered in the Pacific Northwest long after the ill-feelings subside.