Canucks GM Ryan Johnson preaching patience as losses pile up |
VANCOUVER — The evening before training camp opened, general manager Ryan Johnson gathered the Vancouver Canucks’ staff and players for a dinner meeting at the team’s lakeside hotel in Penticton, and then spoke the truth.
“The No. 1 thing I talked about is: ‘You have no idea how hard this is going to be,’” Johnson recalled Wednesday. “Like, ‘what you've signed up for here is almost impossible.’ You’d be ignorant... if you thought you were just going to walk in and things would fall into place. I said: ‘You’ve got to be ready because you're going to get punched in the face real quick.’
“And here we are. Game 11.”
Here they are, bruised and spiralling through an eight-game losing streak and just 2-8-1 through the start of the rebuild’s first full season.
In their last five games, Vancouver has been tied or led four times through 40 minutes and trailed (by a goal) once, then been outscored 11-0 in the third period while losing all of them.
The rebuild is not the impossible part that Johnson referred to just five weeks ago, although there is overwhelming evidence around the National Hockey League — see the Detroit Red Wings, the Canucks’ opponents Thursday — that it will be difficult.
The impossible part is believing the Canucks, under new management, with new coaches and new systems, many young and new players, and lofty organizational priorities regarding culture and environment, would somehow come out of the gate and be successful competitively against a murderer’s row of initial opponents.
In seven of their first 11 games, the Canucks have faced a team that has either won........