Spector on Canucks: A year in change

SAN JOSE — To be the team the Vancouver Canucks have become today, they first had to be that other team.

The one Canucks fans were always told they had, and they would counter with, “Your guy dives as much as Alex Burrows does.” Or, “the other player was yapping at Ryan Kesler first.”

To get to this side of the equation — the one where San Jose Sharks head coach Todd McLellan sits behind a microphone and admits, “We lost our composure,” — the Canucks had to have that Game 4 meltdown against Chicago a year ago.

“We lost our composure again. I don’t know why it happened,” Roberto Luongo said that night, after his team had come completely unglued in a 7-4 loss. “We were all on the same page before the game started, and I don’t know… One thing led to another, and we lost our composure again.”

Fast forward a year and a bit, and there was Luongo, standing at YVR with his carry-on bag hanging from one shoulder, answering questions about Game 2 of this Western Conference final, won handily by his Canucks.

The goaltender who once was so busy signaling offside for a linesman in a playoff game against Anaheim a few years ago, the one that Rob Neidermayer’s 60-foot shot slid in under his raised arm, admitted of the Sharks’ meltdown: “We’ve gone down that road before, and it hasn’t worked so well for us.”

“You learn from the past,” he said. “I think (Game 2 against San Jose) was a great example.”

This spring it’s the other guys who are coming unglued, with over-aggressive penalties, or foolish distractions like asking for a fight before the series has even begun. And this year it is the Canucks who have their arms in the air — for all the right reasons — as they ignore the referees and bury the Sharks with a string of powerplay goals that turned a 3-2 contest into a 7-3 runaway.

You knew something had to change when, a year ago in Round 2, even the ultra-sedate Daniel Sedin lost it in back to back games against Chicago.

Remember how that pesky Dave Bolland got under Daniel Sedin’s skin, driving him to distraction — and the penalty box — while exposing a side of Daniel we had never before seen?

Here’s the part we didn’t know about that:

“You get frustrated when you feel that their team is better than your team,” Daniel said Thursday, when taken back to that out-of-character moment in his career. “This year, we have a better team. Chicago had a lot more depth than we had last year, and that’s what happens.

“San Jose is a very good team. But when you feel you have a good team, like we do this year, we don’t need to worry about those kinds of things. For us it’s simple: We bring our best game, and usually, it’s enough.”

We’ve heard all season long about how Burrows and Kesler decided to turn over new leafs in 2010-11. Now, it doesn’t happen over night, but the referees we’ve spoken to list Kesler as a solid, hard-working player, while Burrows is getting better, but still not afraid to snap his head back after a hit to the body.

Old habits die hard.

“We talked about that a lot during the season, and we talked a lot about it before the playoffs,” defenceman Kevin Bieksa said. “Ya gotta keep your cool. We go up 4-2 (in Game 2), it’s still a game. After that we got a lot of powerplays … that’s usually how we keep teams honest.”

There was one player who knew that age-old formula of turning the other cheek, then thrusting the dagger in on the powerplay. He had seen it first-hand, and in a key signing by GM Mike Gillis, imported the culture into the Canucks dressing room.

“Michael Samuelsson was the first person to say, ‘Let’s go whistle to whistle. Let’s stay off the ref’s,’” Bieksa said. “At first we kind of teased him. ‘Whistle to whistle…? We’re not a whistle to whistle team.’”

Then they lost to Chicago again, for the second straight spring, unraveling right to the end. And there’s Samuelsson, the quiet Swede with the Stanley Cup ring, looking awfully sage.

“Detroit always played hard, whistle to whistle, and stayed away from the antics after the whistle. They played hockey the right way,” Vigneault said of the Red Wings. “We’ve talked a lot about modeling ourselves after good teams, and they’re one of them.”

A year ago, after that big loss in Game 4 where everyone from Daniel, to Burrows, to Bieksa, had made undisciplined mistakes to fall behind 3-1 in the series, Vigneault sat behind the podium, a man without an answer.

We remember it like it was yesterday.

“I really believe this group is ready for this moment,” he said that evening. “But obviously our actions right now are proving me wrong.”

Hmmm. How times have changed.

Mark Spector is the lead columnist for Sportsnet.ca

Follow me on Twitter.com @SportsnetSpec