The Canucks Had a Horrid Season: Did They Need It?
If you’re looking at the Vancouver Canucks right now, you kind of have to sit with two thoughts at the same time. One is obvious: that was a brutal season. The other is a little more uncomfortable, but maybe more important. Was it actually the kind of brutal season that pushes a team forward?
Canucks fans can only hope, because the season really did go off the rails.
Trading Quinn Hughes seemed like the worst thing in the world.
The team traded away Quinn Hughes, and for a while, it felt like losing the most important player they’ve had in a decade. Maybe longer, depending on how far back your memory goes. At the same time, the guy who is supposed to be the other cornerstone (Elias Pettersson) just hasn’t really looked like that guy anymore. And that gets awkward when he’s sitting on an $11 million cap hit. The goalie situation hasn’t helped either. Thatcher Demko is expensive and talented, but always in and out of the lineup. Nothing has been stable.
And then there’s the coaching. First-year Adam Foote comes in, and it just looks like the game is moving a little too fast for him. That happens sometimes. But it doesn’t help when everything else around him is also wobbling. The GM gets fired, but remnants of the old structure remain because, in Vancouver, it’s never quite that clean. Someone else still has their fingerprints on everything. And the season ends with them not just near the bottom, but basically sitting at the bottom with no real argument against it.
The Canucks season, in a word, was ugly.
It was an ugly season, but here’s where it might get interesting. As painful as it is, it does something else. It clears the fog. You can’t really lie to yourself after 58 points. There’s no “we were close” narrative that survives that kind of year. It forces honesty, whether the organization wants it or not.
And about the Hughes trade? At first, it felt like the kind of move that would haunt them. But the early returns were far from disastrous. In fact, most people around the league seem to think Vancouver did okay, all things considered. Not a steal, not a robbery, but not a collapse either. That matters more than it sounds.
If you’ve watched the team, you get the feeling that something is forming here. The under-25 group isn’t empty. There are pieces, but they are not finished. But what you see on this team doesn’t require a full teardown from scratch.
So, are the Canucks going to be okay?
It’s hard to say for sure. But sometimes the seasons that feel like setbacks are just the ones that finally make it obvious what needs to change. No pain, no gain, as the old cliché goes. Vancouver just happened to get the full version of that lesson all at once.