VANCOUVER — They say history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce.
Make no mistake, what happened at Rogers Arena on Saturday night as the Canucks were defeated by the Buffalo Sabers 5-1 and booed voraciously on home ice in just the sixth game of this young season of the NHL, it was not tragic, although the performance of the club was.
No, the tragedy was felt in 2018, when the club never found a way to reload with enough discipline or strategic consistency in the Jim Benning era, ultimately failing to offer Henrik and Daniel Sedin another relevant team to play before retiring.
What we are witnessing now, this is a farce.
The Vancouver market, and more worryingly, the players on this hapless Canucks team, are so practiced at making “team in crisis” moves that we seem to have advanced the process this time around .
The regular season started just 10 days ago! Ten days!
That hasn’t stopped this team from setting a new record, not only for the protagonists, but also for how quickly they’ve gone through the performance stages that bad teams ritually go through, as the reality of his ineptitude throughout the course. NHL regular season.
After blowing multi-goal leads in their first three contests, the Canucks had a players-only meeting in Washington last week. There were only three games.
Before we could figure it out, the club pulled another lead from Columbus. After four games, the insider reports that the management is not considering a change behind the bench (yet).
After another third-period lead in Game 5, the club returned home and made an unconvincing stance, insisting their game was headed in the right direction.
Finally, on Saturday night, the club returned to the supposedly friendly confines of Rogers Arena. And this one had it all.
The road team opened the scoring with a power play goal. A gentleman in a retro Canucks jersey and a paper bag on his head, posing for photos with other fans in his section. The fans booed during the game as the game drifted away from Vancouver. They booed as the Sabres’ top line circulated the puck endlessly in Vancouver’s end. They booed the Canucks on the power play. They even booed “Sweet Caroline.”
There was a tense moment between JT Miller and Luke Schenn after a Miller turnover late in the second period, as the inevitable tension that arises between teammates facing the constant hopelessness of losing spilled over into public view.
Heard HNIC had the clip of JT Miller and Luke Schenn arguing at the end of the second, went back and grabbed it from the end of the intermission.
This is not a happy team at the moment. #Canucks pic.twitter.com/FhA99eSys6
— Lachlan Irvine (@LachInTheCrease) October 23, 2022
By the end of the night, Canucks head coach Bruce Boudreau was breaking down the effort level of his players. He said his message to his team after the game was that they needed to “look in the mirror”.
During a fascinating moment of his availability after the game, Boudreau appeared to be trading against himself, as the Canucks often do when signing overpriced veteran players, trying unsuccessfully to convince himself that his players hadn’t given up in the third period.
“I never like to use that word,” Boudreau said of the idea that his players might have “given up” late. “It seemed like they were saying, ‘Oh, there’s no way we’re going to catch up.’
“And because they haven’t been successful yet … I mean, I’d like to think that there wasn’t anybody out there saying, ‘I don’t care what happens now, I’m quitting,’ but I just can’t, ever I will accept it in my mind.
“But I’m serious, of course… like when you want two men to pre-check because you need a target and only one man goes in. And I mean, they know exactly what they’re supposed to do on some of the targets, and in our D zone they’re not doing it at all… that’s really frustrating.”
“I hope the players feel the same way I do about it – it’s absolutely disgraceful… if I were the fans I’d be frustrated too.” – Boudreau on the reaction. #Canucks
— Thomas Drance (@ThomasDrance) October 23, 2022
Finally, to round out the evening, it featured the club’s still relatively new president of hockey operations, Jim Rutherford, who appeared on Hockey Night in Canada’s “After Hours” interview show, fresh from ‘an emotional and disheartening loss for his team.
He was asked the million dollar question we’ve all asked ourselves, though we’ve all secretly always known the answer: “Why isn’t this organization committed to rebuilding?”
Actually, more specifically, longtime VIP Graham M. asked him, “Jim: We want a rebuild, we’ve wanted a rebuild since the end of the Sedin era. Why is this team so adamantly opposed to giving – us a reconstruction?”
“Yeah, well,” Rutherford began, following his club’s defeat at the hands of a young, up-and-coming team that traded Jack Eichel just 11 months earlier, “I think people have to realize how much time is the reconstructions.
“You look at some of the teams that went through it and we look at them now and how good they are now, but there were a lot of tough years. We may be in a rebuild in the direction we’re going, but ideally we’d like to transition from this team on the go.
“We’ve got some core players, some young players that are really good, and those guys just have to keep working and try to get through it right now. But we’re going to keep adding younger players to this team and we’re going to put it together next year or less”.
It says everything you need to know about the state of this era of the Canucks, and the farce their fans are living right now, just weeks away from committing $56 million over seven years to a 29-year-old forward, the club it’s already trending rapidly in a direction where new management’s preferred plan to “transition this team on the fly” is unsustainable.
The transition on the fly is unsustainable because it is so at odds with the reality and ability of this team. There just isn’t enough talent on the back end for this team to credibly compete in the short term. The infrastructure is simply lacking.
More importantly, though, it’s unsustainable because of the appetite of paying customers in this hockey-savvy market.
A #Canucks jersey appeared to have been thrown onto the ice after the Sabres’ 4-1 goal, as Al Murdoch asks people to ‘not throw objects on the ice’.
— Thomas Drance (@ThomasDrance) October 23, 2022
Fans want a plan. They want containment. They want real hope, not the flimsy, artificial stuff that the organization sells to the gullible every summer, only to be wiped out in November year after year.
On Saturday night, at least, the fans made that abundantly clear. And it only lasted six games.
(Photo of Buffalo Sabers players celebrating a goal while Canucks players look dejected: Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)