VANCOUVER – Positivity and optimism carried Bruce Boudreau to the National Hockey League.
He served more than 1,100 games in the minors to earn the privilege of dressing for 141 NHL games as a player. After retiring, he spent 17 years coaching professional hockey before he became a “rookie” NHL head coach with the Washington Capitals at age 52.
Positivity and optimism were like air and water for Boudreau. He wouldn’t have survived without them, and he figures the Vancouver Canucks can’t survive without them now.
But both are in short supply.
The Canucks have lost six of their last eight home games, and haven’t won at Rogers Arena in regulation time since Nov. 18. At home this season, they have as many wins as they do 5-1 losses: five. And nearly all of the U-turns the Canucks have made whenever they’ve found traction in the standings have come on home ice.
This is a team that could disillusion Mahatma Gandhi.
But as Boudreau explained after Monday’s 5-1 embarrassment against the St. Louis Blues, who were only two points away in the standings but light years ahead of the Canucks: “I’ve got to make them think they can win. If they don’t think they can win, then there’s no chance of us ever winning.”
You can still feel the positivity around the Canucks, who practised Wednesday like they were riding a winning streak into Thursday’s home game against the Seattle Kraken. But optimism? It’s hard to see how that could be – outscored 10-2 their last two games, their defensive game in tatters, with Pettersson (Elias) sick at home and Pederson (Lane) up from the minors to replace him.
“I feel like you can always be positive, but I also think there’s a fine line about being positive and not caring,” veteran defenceman Oliver Ekman-Larsson said. “We’ve got to realize what kind of position we’re in, too, and what kind of games we have to play to be successful. And I feel like we haven’t been doing that. I think it’s always easy to say that we have to stay positive but I think it’s harder (to do).”
After the Canucks lost by four goals to the Winnipeg Jets on Saturday, defenceman Ethan Bear, still relatively new to Vancouver, told Sportsnet: “We’ve got to stop having so much fun and just get to work because of what needs to be done.”
His comment raised a complicated issue.
The Canucks, many of their players have said, genuinely enjoy playing together. They are friends as well as teammates. The young core players have been together for four years. But, except for three rounds of playoff bubble hockey in Edmonton in 2020, they haven’t won.
President of hockey operations Jim Rutherford and general manager Patrik Allvin have talked about culture since they arrived last winter. Are the players too comfortable?
In the baseball movie Moneyball, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, played handsomely by Brad Pitt, smashes a bat in the clubhouse when he sees his players dancing and having fun after a loss.
“Is losing fun?” Beane asks.
With the players stunned into silence, Beane raises a finger and cocks his head slightly to listen before saying: “That’s what losing sounds like.”
No one on the Canucks is dancing after losses. But have they become accustomed to them?
“I’m not in there and I don’t know what they feel for each other,” Boudreau said. “But I personally never make them feel comfortable if they’re not winning. Same as I told them last year when I got here; ‘Winning is the only thing. I don’t care what your numbers are.’ Whether we win 7-6 or 1-0 . . . winning is everything.
“You guys don’t see that side of me (but) I give them sh– way more than I want to, but it’s my job. If we have a bad period, I’ll go right in and rip them. But then. . . I’ve got to build them back up. I’ve got to find something positive out of it that can make the next period better.”
“Bruce is the positive guy, right?” winger J.T. Miller said. “He has a more positive body language that I do — just as people. That’s one of his best qualities as a coach. He gets us to want to run through a wall as a team every day. But as a group, you can’t just say be positive and then put up a bad effort be positive. For me, if you want to be positive, have something positive to talk about. Like, go compete, play hard, play within our structure, do your job. Sometimes you go out and you lose the game (but) you played a helluva game. That would be positive. But it’s hard to be positive watching our video and not liking what we see.”
Asked about having fun, Miller said each individual reacts differently to situations.
“Whether you’re happy, positive, pissed off, it shouldn’t matter,” he said. “Guys breaking sticks over the boards — I’ve obviously done that — or guys that are just laid-back guys, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if you’re out there smiling or you’re out there running guys in practice. We have an expectation of the right way to play in practice and in the game. As a leader and guys on the team that have accountability levels, that should be our standard at all time — just to play the same way.
“Every day we come in here, we’re like, ‘Did we play to our standard or not?’ And as of late, we have not.”
Miller insisted players hold each other accountable.
“I think this group is really hard on each other, but in a good way,” Ekman-Larsson said. “I think we’ve been positive when we have to be, but we’ve also been hard on each other when we when we have to be. Obviously, we’re in the position we are (at 13-15-3). We need to switch something and we need to play better. That’s what it comes down to.”
Boudreau relayed a message of hope to his players in this week, telling them about the 2015-16 season when he was coaching the Anaheim Ducks, who started 1-7-2 and didn’t make it back to .500 until New Year’s Eve. They went 31-10-5 the rest of the way.
“I’ve told them that story,” he said. “And then we ended up winning the division. And, you know, we’re two games under .500. We could do exactly what we did in Anaheim.”
