It was supposed to be a weekend of celebration in Vancouver – and, instead, it’s turned into a week of crisis and controversy.
The Heritage Classic, Canada’s version of the Winter Classic played on New Year’s Day at an outdoor location somewhere in America, was in town Sunday afternoon, and the eyes of the hockey world were upon one of Canada’s great cities. Expectations were high.
On Sunday, it was Vancouver’s turn to shine. BC Place, home of opening and closing ceremonies of the famous Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games, had been transformed from it’s usual guise, as a football arena for the CFL’s BC Lions and also home to the MLS expansion franchise, the Vancouver Whitecaps, and was ready to host the city’s favourite team against the visiting Ottawa Senators.
Sure, the closed roof (due to wet weather) meant that it wasn’t really an outdoor game, but no one seemed to mind. After all, it was hockey on it’s grandest regular-season scale, and a great opportunity for the Canucks to have a share of the national spotlight (something they havent often had, at least for on-ice reasons in a disappointing 2013-14 campaign) for a little while.
Then, came the game, and by the end, the Canucks and their fans were probably wishing that the national spotlight had never come to town to shine on a team that had, not all that long ago, gone to the brink, a Game 7 of a Stanley Cup Final, and are now a shell of their former Western Conference powerhouse selves.
It started well – Vancouver had a 2-0 lead less than twelve minutes in – but the wheels promptly fell off the Canucks wagon, and, to the horror of the capacity crowd of 54,194, most of whom were Vancouver fans, back-up goalie Eddie Lack allowed four straight tallies for the Senators, who headed east with a 4-2 victory.
Hang on – back-up goalie Eddie Lack, right? Why was the rookie back-up starting the biggest game of Vancouver’s season? A good question…one that every hockey fan and pundit from here to the Middle East was likely asking. Except, maybe, those from Ottawa, who were probably quite happy to have someone other than Roberto Luongo, the team’s regular starter (up until then, anyway…) and something of a popular figure in Vancouver, for the way he’s dealt with so much drama and upheaval with nothing but style and aplomb.
And how is Luongo rewarded for his dogged perseverance when it seemed like neither his current coach, John Tortorella, or his former one, Alain Vigneault, on the eve of a special game? He is relegated to riding the pine, a back-up goalie for Lack, a mostly-untested rookie, to whom Tortorella – for reasons that I don’t fully understand, and doubt that I ever will – gave the start in what is was a showcase moment, a marquee event with all the bells and whistles, a playoff-type game in terms of it’s special, extra-meaningful feel.
Yet again, Luongo was snubbed. A mark of the man he is, the spurned net-minder took his seat at the end of the bench, dutifully opening and closing the gate to the ice, and appearing nothing but serenely happy the entire time, knowing full well that the cameras – and, by extension, so many eyes across Canada and around the world – would be focused on him, looking for a look, a curse…anything to be construed as a sign of obvious frustration. No, said Luongo. He was the consummate professional throughout, even as a game that started well for his team went horribly off the rails.
By all accounts, Lack is a good man and is blossoming into a good NHL goalie, but you can only wonder what Tortorella was thinking. The lame excuse that Lack had played well coming out of the Olympic break isn’t going to fly here. Even if that’s the case, after everything Luongo has endured for – and because of – the mishandling of the goalie situation in Vancouver, that was his start. In any other game, it wouldn’t have mattered, but this wasn’t any other game. This was a big one, and the most popular guy on the team (who is also a two-time Olympic gold medallist, and a long-time member of the storied franchise) deserved to get the start.
It was a no-brainer, an easy decision that Tortorella needed to make. The recently-arrived coach said he understood what’s gone on before his tenure with regard to goalies, and how he gets that Vancouver’s fan base love Luongo for everything he’s gone through, and the way he goes through it. Why, then, John, did you do the hockey equivalent of kicking a guy in the you-know-where? Luongo deserved the marquee start.
Tortorella can’t be serious if he thinks the team’s best chance to win a hockey game is Lack over Luongo, one of the leaders in the locker room, and a guy who, for better or worse, has absorbed a hell of a lot of hockey lessons over the years
By making the decision he did, Tortorella thrust both his goalies into a lose-lose situation and enraged the lifeblood of any sporting franchise: the fans. There were nearly sixty-thousand of them booing Lack when his photo was shown on the big scoreboard and, when the Senators scored the game-winning goal, the chant you almost knew was coming came: “We want Lou!”
Making matters worse, Tortorella said he’d make the same decision again, because Lack was playing “lights out”.
Now, choosing between Luongo and Lack it won’t be a problem. Days after the Heritage Classic snub, the craziness that had come to define the Canucks-Luongo relationship finally ended. This was the team who sat Luongo in the midst of their 2012 playoff run in favour of Corey Schneider, and it seemed that Schneider would be their man going forward.
To his credit, Luongo did what he was asked, became a role model back-up, helping Schneider where he could, and doubtless certain that he would be traded out by the end of the coming summer.
Instead, bizarrely, Schneider was the man on the move, heading to New Jersey, and suddenly Luongo was a starting goalie again. Straddled with a contract that was always going to make him hard to move (and made harder by the new Collective Bargaining Agreement penalising long term, back-loaded contractors), Luongo, despite rumours about being dealt to Toronto, stayed put. He was the main man once again, and surely his head was spinning. No one could have foreseen this. By all rights, it should have been Luongo out the door, not Schneider.
Throughout events that lurched back and forth with less sense than a bad daytime soap opera, Luongo became something of a sympathetic figure, embraced by Vancouver’s fans, because it didn’t take a genius to figure out that things had been botched. Those who support Canucks General Manager Mike Gillis and blame Luongo’s contract for the lack of trade interest in him should remember that it was Gillis who presented that very same contract to Luongo.
Now, it’s over. Luongo is off to Florida, where he came from back in 2006, and now the Canucks supporters are stuck with Lack, the guy they booed on Sunday at the Heritage Classic. A year ago, Luongo and Schneider looked a pretty good goalie tandem – maybe the best in the NHL – but now Vancouver has neither. And, they’re still paying a sizeable chunk of Luongo’s salary, and will continue to do so even if he retires early, thanks to the new contract rules. Now, if that’s not an indication of how badly things were screwed up by everyone from Gillis down, I don’t know what is.
Lack and Jacob Markstrom (acquired as part of the deal sending Luongo south) are now Vancouver’s two goalies of note. Between them, they’ve played a grand total of 68 NHL regular season games together and zero playoff games. If Canucks fans thought it was rough before, well, it’s going to get even rougher down the stretch. I feel sorry for the fans in Vancouver. They’ve been screwed by their team again, tossed back onto the emotional roller-coaster.
Making matters worse is the apparent dissatisfaction of star forward Ryan Kesler. The American-born fan wants out, though a deal wasn’t worked out for him before the trade deadline. Whether Kesler – who says he wants to play for an American team, but is perhaps more intent on playing anywhere other than Vancouver, and after the week’s events, you can’t blame him – gets moved during the summer remains to be seen.
One thing that is certain: having a veteran guy like Kesler unhappy in the locker room can’t be good for team morale. John Tortorella’s stewardship of the Canucks hasn’t exactly been a shining success so far. The Canucks seem to have said ‘no’ to the style of hockey that their new coach has tried to implement. It’s a scheme of defensive accountability, blocking shots, strangling the opposition.
It worked for a while in New York – the Rangers reached the Eastern Conference Finals in 2012, falling to their rivals from New Jersey – before most of the locker room got sick of the way things were done under Tortorella. Their coach was eventually fired, though not before making enemies of players like Brad Richards and Marian Gaborik. Richards was hugely disillusioned but remains a Ranger under Alain Vigneault (ironically, the Canucks coach last season, and throughout much of the Luongo drama) but Gaborik was run out of town.
We’ve heard about Kesler’s unhappiness, and though he is a consummate pro and will give every bit of what he has until the end of his time in Vancouver, you wonder if it isn’t systematic of the locker room as a whole. Luongo was popular, a leader, so his Heritage Classic snub and eventual trade, can’t be going down well. Is Tortorella about to lose the room? Has he lost it already?
If there was a question as to where the heads to the Vancouver roster are at following a week of upheaval, the devastating answer came in Thursday night’s game in Dallas. In every possible way, shape and form, the Canucks were demolished, demoralised and basically sent running and screaming from American Airlines Centre. It was 6-1 in the end, but 5-0 midway through the second period.
Dallas’ resident superstar, Tyler Seguin, was a one-man wrecking crew, recording a hat-trick and two assists for a five-point night. As it happened, as Seguin sent the Canucks spiralling further out of control, televisions were surely switching channels right across British Columbia. Aside from Kesler and a select few others, this was a team uninterested, unmotivated and seemingly lacking in basic hockey skills.
As much as Canucks fans hate to hear it or read it or have it spoken out, the best option now for GM Gillis is to level the entire franchise. I mean, blow it right up, melt it to the ground and start all over again. Whether that includes Tortorella, I don’t know, but this team, as it is, will have trouble winning five games on the trot, let alone a playoff series, a Western Conference title, or a Stanley Cup championship.
When you get to that stage, when you come to that realisation, that’s the only way to go about things. Vancouver cannot compete as they are built now. As painful a process as it is, starting all over again is the first step up the ladder. The top rung, of course, is the Stanley Cup.
Whether Gillis survives to see next summer is another question – he was responsible for both Luongo’s contract and trading Schneider away, two situations that have sent the franchise into a nose dive – but there are definitely good reasons why he should be relieved of his duties. We will know more come the summertime.
At least, for Roberto Luongo, the craziness is at an end. He’ll appreciate the Panthers and the relative anonymity he’ll enjoy in Sunrise, Florida, which will never be mistaken for a hockey hotbed – not a bad thing, given the circumstances – and the Panthers will surely benefit from a guy with Luongo’s talents, who still has plenty left to give the game.
One of the most stand-up guys in the entire National Hockey League is finally free of a toxic situation. His old franchise was in crisis, and remains that way. Days are bleak in Vancouver, and the road back to competitiveness in the ultra-tough Western Conference seems a dreadfully long way away.
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