TORONTO — What’s really left to say about the state of this hockey team?
On the big stage, on Hockey Night in Canada, against the team that Vancouver Canucks fans enjoy beating most, they were dreadful and they lost.
It wasn’t your average loss though. This was a loss that put the Canucks’ total failure on full display for the hockey world to see.
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The Canucks were crushed on Saturday night, demolished, pulverized, in a 3-2 game that was nowhere near as close as the score line indicated. They looked the way their fans feel every day, hopeless.
The Toronto Maple Leafs were faster, more disciplined and better structured. Despite playing in the second leg of a back-to-back, the Maple Leafs seemed to barely break a sweat in exerting an outrageous level of control throughout the evening.
Shift after shift the Maple Leafs were able to get in behind Vancouver’s defence with bullet-train speed. They cycled endlessly, a twisted Hall of Fame tribute to the Sedin twins, ramping up that part of their game as the night went along, pinning Vancouver’s skaters for shifts that would last a minute (or two) with disturbing regularity. Toronto was even the more dangerous team in the first, though Vancouver built an opportunistic 2-0 lead.
The debate had raged this week in Vancouver, spurred on by Jim Rutherford’s commentary at the outset of this road trip — Are this team’s issues structural, or are they personnel based? — only for the game on Saturday to provide a definitive answer. Turns out it’s both.
“We stopped playing,” summarized head coach Bruce Boudreau, offering a searing indictment of his team’s maddening inconsistency. “It happens every game that there’s a 10-minute lull or a 10-minute something. The game before it was the first 10 minutes, game before it was in Ottawa but we recovered. Tonight it was the middle 10 minutes, they get the momentum and we sort of stopped playing.”
Perhaps it was the crowd noise. Perhaps it was that the Toronto Maple Leafs are just better.
Perhaps it’s that the club’s blueline surrenders far too many chances against, particularly off of the rush.
Or perhaps it’s that J.T. Miller, who was on the ice for all three of Toronto’s goals, should go back to the wing full-time.
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Whatever the reason and so much is going wrong for this team at the moment that there’s a grain of truth in whatever you want to come up with, you can just sense how inevitable this spiral has become when you’re around the team these days.
This a group that’s down on themselves. That’s out of answers.
One Canucks player, discussing their form on background with The Athletic this week, described their play as “terrible.” I was genuinely stunned.
In the locker room postgame on Saturday night, when asked to explain what happened as his club frittered away another multi-goal lead, Bo Horvat said, “I don’t know and I’m sick of talking about it.”
He wasn’t even dismissive of the question or rude. He just genuinely seemed shell-shocked that it had happened again.
Perhaps the only thing lower than the confidence of the team at the moment is the confidence that fans in the Vancouver market have in the organization.
All of these shine a big, sweltering, balmy spotlight on what’s next for this franchise.
It’s all starting to feel a bit untenable, for sure, but we should proceed cautiously with that argument. Immediate action is the best course to take when something is worth preserving. Passivity, however, is sometimes sensible when failure is so richly rewarded.
Sometimes in life, and in professional sports, you need to just lie in the bed you’ve made.
Here’s where we’re at. The club’s hopes of getting back into the playoff race are getting dimmer with every dispiriting loss. And the club has a back-to-back test looming against the Boston Bruins — tied for one of the best teams in hockey — on Sunday evening. Losing that game in regulation would give the club just 11 points in 16 games, putting them well within the bottom 5 in the NHL by point percentage.
Then there’s the coaching situation. Boudreau’s future, of course, is on the tip of the tongue in the industry. He feels like a natural first domino to fall, considering how publicly Boudreau has been criticized in recent weeks by Canucks management.
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The club, however, was waiting to see how the team responded on this road trip before calculating their next course of action. Three games in, the response has been feeble.
That may not demand change though. There’s certainly a point of view internally that — while the club would rather get on a run — continuing to lose may be preferable to chasing a dead cat bounce with a new coach who might, perhaps, reinvigorate and restore confidence for this moribund group.
Then there’s the trade market. Canucks president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford is as aggressive as any executive in the game, historically, in pursuing trades as a way to shake things up.
As poorly as Vancouver has played, the overwhelming likelihood remains that the Canucks will prove to be pretenders in the Connor Bedard tank-a-thon over 82 games. There’s too much talent on this team, and too many of their best players — like Thatcher Demko — are struggling in ways that simply won’t last.
If Vancouver is going to get busy losing, they’ll have to get busy making deals — and shedding talent off of the roster — as a first step.
So perhaps we’ll see the club do something in the days ahead, but this genuinely isn’t a situation where decisive action is required. In fact, passive acceptance might be their best path forward and it’s something we might do well to embrace.
In the big picture, after all, it’s now in the club’s best interests to string together woeful performances on par with what the club accomplished on Saturday night in Toronto.
The losing is hard to watch and genuinely painful, but it’s better than playing .500 hockey. No one wins when a team is on a collision course set for the 12th overall selection at the NHL Entry Draft.
Sometimes you just have to take your medicine and let the sickness run its course. These losses are brutal, but might it be time to regard them as doctor’s orders?
(Top photo of Maple Leafs defenseman celebrating a goal against the Canucks: John E. Sokolowski / USA Today )
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