Canucks’ roster a tale of turnover and not much else

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It’s pretty amazing to look at the lineup from Bruce Boudreau’s final game as the Vancouver Canucks’ head coach, three years ago this week.

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There are four players left from that game — Elias Pettersson, Brock Boeser, Conor Garland and Tyler Myers — plus Thatcher Demko, who is on the injured list now and was on the injured list then, too.

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That’s turnover. And then some.

Since that team missed the playoffs and had been a true dumpster fire when Boudreau arrived just over a year before, it makes sense that the roster has turned over as much as it has. When something is not working, you should change things up.

And there’s little doubt that over the past four years, Canucks GM Patrik Allvin and president Jim Rutherford have undertaken a true turnover of the roster.

Of course, they didn’t set out to trade away key players Bo Horvat, J.T. Miller or Quinn Hughes. They saw the task as finding different complimentary players to support the work of a core they obviously felt deserved a chance.

In the summer of 2023, they shuffled out about a half-dozen players, moves which seemed to work in the moment. Look how well 2023-24 went. There’s no doubt they got value in the signings that summer of Pius Suter, Ian Cole and Teddy Blueger, especially. Plus they added Nikita Zadorov for a pair of mid-round picks. He struggled in the regular season, but there’s a strong case he was their best player in the playoffs.

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The trade for Elias Lindholm proved less vital, and it came at a great cost. But given where the team was positioned, adding a player like him made lots of sense.

That was a smart summer of moves, and so were those trades during the season.

But for all the talk that what sank the Canucks in 2024-25 was the split between J.T. Miller and Elias Pettersson, we can’t ignore how impactful the roster changes in the summer of 2024 were as well.

The most dramatic decision was to hold the line on a contract offer to Zadorov. Faced with a cap crunch and a slew of veterans who he wanted to retain, Allvin chose not to meet Zadorov’s contract demands and let him walk to Boston. It felt prudent, but given how badly the player wanted to stay and how popular he had proven to be, you can’t help but think about how differently things might have gone had he been retained.

And so, instead of signing Zadorov (and Lindholm and Cole, who both left as free agents) Allvin brought in a slew of free agents, six of whom would break camp with the team, replacing the aforementioned three and displacing young forwards such as Vasily Podkolzin.

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It was inevitable this would have an affect the culture of the team’s dressing room. We saw the result.

No manager should want to stand pat on their roster. Constant tweaks are necessary. You should always be looking to improve on what you have.

But in hindsight, the dramatic turnover in the roster on the heels of a roundly successful season was far too aggressive.

We have pondered so often why 2024-25 went so badly on the heels of a strong 2023-24, but perhaps we have been asking the wrong question.

How did 2024 go so well when everything else has gone so badly? Was 2024 the exception, a lucky blip in a run of just bad hockey?

Management has tried to turn things over here once already, but it didn’t work. Now the core is being turned over.

Will that work? We’ll see.

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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