Same-Day Analysis: Canucks hire NHL's Mr. Fix-It
Bruce Boudreau is renowned for turning around the fortunes of teams he joins. Playoff success? Not so much, but the Canucks are just trying to make the post-season
Bruce Boudreau has been brought in as a coaching savior three times during his coaching career and, in the short term, he has delivered in a big way. In partial seasons with the Washington Capitals and Anaheim Ducks and a full season with the Minnesota Wild, Boudreau has a combined 113-65-23 record in 201 games after taking over a new team.
So, you can be utterly illiterate in reading tea leaves and still be able to determine why the Vancouver Canucks pegged Boudreau to be their new head coach after firing Travis Green on Sunday. As great as Boudreau’s teams have been during the regular season, they’ve left their fans disappointed in the playoffs, but that’s hardly the concern at the moment. The Canucks were built this summer to be a playoff team and they obviously believe they are still that, despite looking terrible through the first quarter of the season and posting an 8-15-2 mark through their first 25 games. The only positive is that they’re Canada’s fifth-best team, which says more about the Montreal Canadiens and the Ottawa Senators than it does about the Canucks.
You also have to wonder whether the Canucks cast their eyes eastward and saw the mediocre season the Philadelphia Flyers are having, which included a 7-1 beatdown by the Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning Sunday afternoon. The GM in Philadelphia just happens to be Chuck Fletcher, who has a past relationship with Boudreau with the Minnesota Wild. And since nobody recycles coaches they’ve liked more than NHL GMs, they had to be wondering whether Fletcher might be inclined to fire Alain Vigneault and hire Boudreau himself with the same intentions the Canucks have.
In the dying minutes of the Canucks’ surprisingly uninspiring 4-1 loss against the Pittsburgh Penguins Saturday night, fans began a rather audible “Fire Benning!” chant. Well, they got a firing at least. But there’s also speculation that Benning might not survive the ownership purge in Vancouver. No official announcement had been made on the coaching change as of Sunday night, which has led some to believe that Benning might also be out. There was also no word on who fired Green and hired Boudreau, Benning or Canucks’ owner Francesco Aquilini. (Or perhaps the Sedin twins, who were hired over the summer special advisors to Benning.) With Benning on such thin ice in that market, it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to give him the authority to fire the coach and choose the new one, does it?
Boudreau, meanwhile, takes over a roster that has seriously underachieved this season and has, at times, looked as though it was playing to have somebody fired. Benning actually made some positive moves this past summer, acquiring defenseman Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Conor Garland from the Arizona Coyotes for Loui Eriksson, Jay Beagle, Antoine Roussel and three draft picks. He also picked up Jason Dickinson, Justin Dowling, Tucker Poolman, Jaroslav Halak, Travis Hamonic and Luke Schenn as free agents and got Elias Pettersson, Quinn Hughes and Thatcher Demko re-signed to contract extensions.
But rather than having an eye to the long-term, Benning made moves to save his job, reasoning that a team can’t win a Stanley Cup if it doesn’t make the playoffs. But somewhere along the way, the Canucks have lost their identity. They seem to have one foot in trying to be a playoff contender and another in rebuilding and that approach almost always leads to mediocrity.
And it might have worked had the Canucks played to their potential this season. There were pundits who had them competing for first place in the Pacific Division this season, so perhaps the notion wasn’t completely unfounded. But you can count on one hand, and still have fingers left over, the number of Canucks who have lived up to their billings this season. They don’t score much, despite generating a good number of shots, and their penalty-killing is atrocious. And worse yet, they often played as though they didn’t seem to care how bad they were. Some of that is on Green, a very good coach who will undoubtedly surface behind another NHL bench before long.
And that’s why Boudreau was brought in. Whether he can do his short-term magic and actually fix this thing and get the Canucks into the playoffs remains to be seen, but there wasn’t a coach out there who has a better record of coming into a situation and make a significant impact.