Spector on Canucks: A quiet confidence
Posted January 25, 2012 8:30 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER – We listened to plenty of quotes, and saw all kinds of things over a two-month playoff haul with the Vancouver Canucks last spring. But the two quotes that stick with us today were harvested on Day 1 of training camp in September:
Assistant coach Rick Bowness was asked about the time needed to recover from a loss as devastating as Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final, and his answer was candid.
“When you lose like that,” Bowness admitted, “it knocks the livin’ hell out of you. For a long, long time.”
Then we spoke to captain Henrik Sedin about the culture of distraction – the diving, the chirping, the biting – that had hitched itself to the Canucks ride last year. And he, too, told us something we never expected to hear.
“I think it needs to (change),” Henrik said, for the first time in our recollection, anyhow. “I think we’ve grown as a team, and it needs to change. If I would be a referee, and I would see guys do that kind of stuff…
“I get back to Detroit,” Henrik concluded. “They’re a good team, they’re always there, and they don’t need to have players doing that kind of stuff.”
Fast forward to the National Hockey League’s all-star break, and we find a Canucks team that – give or take a one-day visit to Boston that seemed to last an entire week – has been quiet as a mouse this season.
When’s the last time the highlight packages included any of those things that Henrik spoke of? The goalie controversy has fizzled to a realization that there are two fine netminders here, and for now, they’re coexistence gives this team the best tandem in hockey.
Alex Burrows is silently stacking up another 30-goal, 50-point campaign, and we’re not hearing any ref’s stories that begin with, “The other night in Vancouver…”
“It’s a quiet confidence,” said defenceman Kevin Bieksa, before his Canucks outlasted a game Edmonton Oilers team 3-2 in a shootout Tuesday night at Rogers Arena. “We’ve won a lot of games. Big games. Pressure games. Overtime games. When you go through something like that you get better from it. You know what it takes. Right now it’s just a confident group. When we’re playing our game, 90 per cent of the time we’re going to be successful.”
And that is where we’re at in the Western Conference nowadays. Nobody needs to hear a team like Vancouver, or Chicago, Detroit, San Jose – even St. Louis -tell us that they’re good. We know that.
They’re going to have to show us, because one of those five clubs (at least) will not emerge from the first round of the playoffs come April.
The battles are fresh for these Canucks, and they seem ready to take on whoever it may be, when the time comes. From a visitor’s perspective, this locker room is more comfortable in its own skin now. They are very good, they know it, and feel no need to either hear that fact spoken or speak it themselves.
So the question becomes, what makes these Canucks a better team this year than last?
“We’ve been through a lot, as we all know,” said goaltender Roberto Luongo, who was stellar Tuesday night in the Canucks final game before the all-star break. “We’ve been through it, once. Especially the fact that we didn’t win, the next time around we might be hungrier, and we might be smarter about how we handle things. Myself included (laughs).”
That self-deprecating joke was not in Luongo’s repertoire in the past. That it now is a sign of confidence. It always shows comfort, when you can admit mistakes or have a laugh at your own expense. This team was always confident, but after last year’s run, somehow it seems that much more legit this time around.
Why?
“Because you don’t go through an experience like that and not become better,” Bieksa said. “We’ve been to the end; we know it’s attainable; we know we’re a good enough team. We know what it takes, but we still respect the process, and the other teams in this league.”
But now they respect the Canucks. And if they don’t, they’d better start.
