VANCOUVER—The image of Bruce Boudreau surveying the crowd on Saturday night, tears on his face, clapping and waving in deep appreciation for Vancouver Canucks fans after another home loss will resonate in this city long after the successful veteran head coach is fired in the coming days.
It was deeply touching in the moment, but it’s now an ignominious piece of Canucks franchise history.
Against a superior opponent Saturday night, Boudreau’s players emptied the tank to try and rally for him. They fell short.
And as the game ended, Boudreau stood on the bench, tears in his eyes and contemplated his hockey mortality.
He searched out his wife in the crowd and held back tears as the fans serenaded him appreciatively one final time: “Bruce There It Is!”
“You never know if it’s the end,” Boudreau said of the moment. He spoke through tears. He stopped frequently to gather himself.
“When you’ve been in it for almost 50 years, the majority of your life, and if it’s the end, I had to stay out there and look at the crowd and say, ‘Remember this moment’…”
Boudreau has been around a while. He’s been fired from NHL jobs before — on three previous occasions in fact. This was different, however, in part because he’s 68 years old now and in part because this is a situation that no one who works professionally in this industry has ever previously encountered.
“I’ve never had it where, like, I was fired once in the middle of the season — and by the way they haven’t fired me,” Boudreau said, as the media laughed. “And George (McPhee) called me to his house and we had a long talk.”
Canucks fans showed their support for Boudreau on Saturday night in the Canucks’ loss to the Oilers. (Bob Fried/USA Today)
It was an anecdote that underlined how unusually — and how callously — Boudreau has been treated by the Canucks organization. He’s still yet to hear about his fate directly from club leadership, even though the specifics are common knowledge.
He doesn’t know which of his assistant coaches will be retained and which will depart, although he made sure to vouch for his staff at length postgame.
He’s known the ax was going to fall for weeks — months even — but he’s baffled by the timing and the impersonality of it all. He quipped on Saturday that the club had been waiting until the schedule turned to cake, to make sure his replacement is put in a position to succeed. He then wished his replacement “good luck.”
“It’s different when you get to say goodbye to the players,” Boudreau continued, a bit meekly, the tectonic emotions of the moment welling up, “and they’re emotional and I’m emotional…”
The end of Boudreau’s Canucks tenure has played out in a way that’s been deeply unflattering for the Canucks and their management team.
Boudreau hasn’t been fired yet, he hasn’t had a lengthy one tête-à-tête with club leadership to explain the reasoning. His firing hasn’t even been delivered by press release yet; instead it’s been relayed in drips and drabs during “Hockey Night in Canada” intermission segments.
Boudreau deserves better than to be undermined and tossed aside in this manner. Canucks fans know it, the whole hockey world knows it and his players know it too.
Across parts of two seasons with a middling roster catastrophically short on both overall two-way ability and puck moving skill from the back-end, Boudreau guided the Canucks to 50 wins, 40 losses and 13 losses beyond regulation.
113 points in 103 games isn’t great — it’s a 90-point per 82-game pace — but based on the talent at Boudreau’s disposal during his Canucks tenure, it’s impossible to argue that the veteran head coach didn’t find a way to wring as much as he reasonably could have out the players he was given.
This Canucks side is, after all, in construction and intent and on true talent (despite their miserable results this season), a fringe playoff team.
That gap in talent between the Canucks and the bona fide playoff teams like the Edmonton Oilers side that bested them on Saturday is extremely evident. It’s clear and obvious.
It’s also the main hockey problem in Vancouver in the short-term.
This team isn’t struggling because of systems or player deployment. This team’s problems aren’t structural. It’s not even a lack of effort most nights. Canucks management is likely kidding themselves if they truly believe that a coaching change can fix it this.
The likelihood is that Rick Tocchet — reportedly set to replace Boudreau this week — will struggle to surpass Boudreau’s record in his first 103 games behind the Canucks bench, particularly with Bo Horvat likely to depart the organization in some capacity in the coming weeks.
This team isn’t good enough as constructed. It’s actually even worse than that. With no cap flexibility, a shallow prospect pool, no fixed cost certainty on their most important players and an overall deficit of high-value trade assets, there’s likely no direct route to building something better in Vancouver in the near term.
Of all the people who deserve blame for this state of abject hopelessness that has engulfed the Canucks franchise, Boudreau ranks dead last on the list.
He arrived in Vancouver as a breath of fresh air. He won his first nine games and resonated immediately and powerfully with the fanbase and players in the Canucks locker room. On the whole he led this team to a record commensurate with the quality of the assembled roster — if not slightly better.
As he departed Rogers Arena on Saturday evening, likely for the final time as Vancouver’s head coach, Boudreau did so as a potent symbol of an organization that has lost its way.
One wonders, based on the tone in the rink on Saturday, and the supportive commentary of Canucks players, whether Boudreau’s lengthy, slow motion dismissal may also mark the end of the grace period extended to Jim Rutherford, Patrik Allvin and their still relatively new Canucks. management team.
If Canucks hockey operations believe that Boudreau’s presence was such a problem that he had to be treated in this manner, that this course of action and this The level of public embarrassment was justified, well, they had better be right. There can be no further margin for error.
Because as the reaction of the fans at Rogers Arena on Saturday night made clear, if you’re trying to sell the story that Boudreau was “the problem” for this team, well, Canucks fans don’t seem to be buying it.
(Photo: Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)
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