The Real Problem with the Canucks

I am amused to hear the moaning and wailing in the Vancouver sports media over the stumbling of the Canucks. Last night, with a 4-0 loss to Minnesota, Vancouver's current spot is 9th in the west, out of the playoffs. When I said to a friend, who has "Oilers" tattooed on his heart, that I didn't much care about the fate of the Canucks, he said, "What? Off the bandwagon?"

No. But the Canucks have managed my expectations to the point where nothing surprises me, certainly not the under-performance that we see. Vancouver has suffered with over 82 man-games of injuries on the blue line alone, so that any success they've had is surprising. But the problem goes deeper.

It's not Näslund's fault. It's not the Sedins' fault. And it's certainly not Luongo's fault. The problems with the Canucks are behind the bench with Defensive Co-ordinator / Minor Leaguer Alain Vigneault and Management Trainee Dave Nonis. Don't get me wrong. Both of these men have shown flashes of brilliance. Both of them have their strengths and their talents, but neither of them have what it really takes to excel at the positions they occupy.

For Nonis, two things. First, a good GM gets the trades done. He makes gambits and wins some, loses others. Hopefully he wins more than he loses. But this GM has essentially buried what assets he has in the ground, not even depositing them in the bank for interest, hoping the fans, his ultimate masters, don't notice the bits of dirt collecting at the edges of his coins every time he pulls them out of the ground.

Second, a good GM recognizes when his coach isn't getting things done before it's screaming out at everyone else. And he does something about it. I'm not saying he does things like the gotta-be-a-winner-myself antics in New Jersey where the GM takes over the coaching role so that it can be his name on the Stanley Cup, which then disappears into thin air. But a good GM recognizes a coach's limitations before the front office's collective nose is rubbed in it. What is Vigneault's weakness?

He's a defensive co-ordinator masquerading as a coach. Crafting a stifling defense without fostering a sniper or two for every line does not win anything lasting. Last year everything came together and Vigneault's negative effects on his snipers hadn't materialized yet but I'm getting ahead of myself. The common cry in the Sun, on the TEAM, wherever is "Where's Nazzy?" "Why are they paying this guy to do nothing?" I have a theory.

The loyal Näslund has not yet lived-down the unfair treatment of his loyal friend, Todd Bertuzzi. Bertuzzi can be called all kinds of things but to say that he was primarily responsible for Steve Moore's injury strikes me as one-dimensional. To me, the biggest culprit is the league who regularly fail to deal with players who dish out injuries with any consistency or proportionality, but that's another story. If Moore had been suspended after his concussive hit on Näslund, the rest of what's happened since would have been hypothetical.

That not having happened, the Canucks lost sight of the (eventually 9-4!) scoreboard and Bertuzzi went after Moore. Watch the tape again. There's no way that #44's hit on Moore is what injured him. What finished him off was the dog pile, part Canucks, part Avalanche putting pressure on his head at ice level. So the first guy in is the easiest one to punish, the guy with the target painted on his back but to lay all the retribution on that one guy isn't fair, and doesn't appear so to a fair-minded guy like Marcus Näslund. You could argue that he should have gotten past that by now but he hasn't. Real men with a real sense of justice sometimes have that problem. They do eventually put it behind them and probably Marcus will get there eventually. He just hasn't yet.

But great coaches get into their players' heads and get them past this kind of thing. Vigneault's long-term successes so far has been with kids. Judging from his performance with Näslund, he doesn't have a clue about the kind of mental surgery an adult player living with those contradictions needs in order to get him out of a slump. His treatment of Trevor Linden (for heart, easily the Stevie-Y of Vancouver) shows him up in even worse light: that he doesn't know how to motivate any adults, let alone those living with the perception of past injustice.

And that's ironic. In Don Hay of the Giants, we have a guy who did it all at the professional level (not to mention Kevin Constantine behind the bench of his arch-rivals in Everett) but seems to prefer staying at the junior level. In Vigneualt, we have a guy who should have stayed there awhile longer. And above Vigneault we have a GM who can't see how deep and crippling the weaknesses of his coach are.

And surrounding them all we have a cadré of pres who see all the problems as being on the ice and in the locker room, alternately praising Luongo for his brilliance or villifying him for throwing his comrades under a bus and leaving them when his wife is about to give birth after a hard pregnancy. And fixated on Näslund's under-performance: yes it is his problem but we know what's under that skin and good coaches bring the great out of their players by any means necessary.

But the pres is wrong: the problems right now are in the front office and behind the bench. And now that the Aquilinis have finished establishing their claim to legitimate ownership of the team, perhaps they can deal with them in the off-season and turn this team into champions at more than the box office. It's probably too late for us to derive maximum benefit from Luongo and Näslund. It may even be too late in the case of the Sedins, Morrison, Ohlund and Salo. I hope not, but I'm a realist.

All I want is that when the ad says, "We are all Canucks," that I don't have a voice in the back of my mind saying, "We are all Cannots," strapped to a wheel of coulda-woulda-shoulda-mights. And that goes beyond on-ice leadership and performance to the guys behind the bench and in the front office. Gas the GM, gas the coach, but have a plan in place when you do, not like the last time, when Brian Burke was the guy that should have stayed and then maybe none of this circus would have happened.