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Dale Weise rips apart Canucks/Torts in interview


DonaldBrashear

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Dale Weise living a dream with the Canadiens

Link: http://montrealgazette.com/sports/hockey/nhl/montreal-canadiens/dale-weise-living-a-dream-with-the-canadiens

Here are some of the best parts. To sum it all up, Dale Weise basically says he isn't a Canuck anymore because of Torts. There's some pretty damaging stuff here though. Makes the Canucks look bad (for hiring Torts), but especially makes Torts look bad. One more nail in the coffin for John Tortorella...

Weise felt there wasn’t really a place for him on the Canucks roster anymore. Most nights he’d play only a handful of minutes on the fourth line. Sometimes the team would scratch him from the lineup entirely, opting to dress a seventh defenceman in his spot.

Last year, in a separate interview with the Montreal Gazette, Weise hinted that he’d fallen out of favour with coach John Tortorella for not instigating more fights.

“It was never something (Tortorella) explicitly said,” Weise said in November. “It was more like, ‘You played four minutes tonight, but what did you really do out there?’”

and

Though things were far from perfect in Vancouver, Weise was excited for his homecoming. He bought “a bunch” of tickets for family and friends in anticipation of the game, but shortly after arriving in his hometown Weise found out he wouldn’t be on the roster against the Winnipeg Jets.

“Of all the things that built up in Vancouver — not getting opportunities, the setbacks, the disappointment — that felt like the low point of my career,” he said. “It was heartbreaking.”

But then, just after skating for an extra 30 minutes following practice, one of Weise’s teammates fell ill and suddenly he was back in the lineup.

“It was weird. I wasn’t going to play, but then you skate me for a half an hour and I’m exhausted and all of a sudden I’m playing,” Weise said. “Then all my family shows up and I’m pumped, I’m excited. It was going to be great. I ended up playing two shifts. I got benched after my second shift. Not one second of ice time for the rest of the night. It was humiliating.

and

“John Tortorella had just returned from his two-week suspension,” Weise said. “So we sat with him for a 45-minute video session where he carved every single person in the room. The mood wasn’t very good. We got dressed for morning skate — John Tortorella doesn’t come out for morning skate — so I went out onto the ice, took two full laps, shot a couple of pucks and the trainer gives me this one from the sideline (Weise recreates the beckoning motions with his finger). “He says, ‘You gotta go see Torts (Tortorella).’

“At this point, I knew I was traded for sure. That or they were going to put me on waivers. John Tortorella wasn’t just going to tell me to pick my game up. I was getting taken off the ice. “I wasn’t nervous so much as excited for something to happen. Things were miserable in Vancouver, even if it was about going down on waivers, I had enough faith in myself that I knew I could succeed in a new situation.

“I went into the dressing room, Tortorella was just standing there alone. He says, ‘There’s a trade in the works, I can’t tell you where to yet, there could be a few teams bidding right now. Get undressed.’ “Then he just walked out of the room. Didn’t say goodbye, didn’t say good luck, nothing. That was it.”

and

By the time he stepped out of the plane at Trudeau International Airport, Weise was greeted by a TV camera crew.

“In Vancouver, I could have worn my Dale Weise jersey around the block and no one would have recognized me,” he said. “Then I get to the airport in Montreal and there’s cameras waiting for me. That’s when I knew things were about to change, things were a lot bigger now.”

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That's a really interesting article. I think this is more indicative of Tortorella's abrasive coaching style than it is of most others in the Canucks organization, though.

Well, to be fair, the Canucks organization is who hired John Tortorella, and they knew full well (or should have known) of his abrasive coaching style. So the Canucks are just as much to blame for putting the players in this situation. It's not like Torts came in and changed his coaching style. He was the guy that he was hired to be. It just turns out the Canucks didn't want that style of coach after all.

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Because we all know that Torts was the sole reason why the Canucks missed the playoffs last year.

Poor power play, lack of scoring, inconsistent play.. funny how most of these problems are still with the team despite new coaching staff.

Is Torts a hard ass? Probably. Is he abrasive? Sure, lot lot coaches have been known to be abrasive.

The fact is, he coached both of his previous teams deep in the playoffs, I don't think one season with a Vancouver team that refused (and still refuses) to play with any consistency should be his legacy.

I mean, despite the new 'fresh start' and new management and coach, the team still has too many nights of tired old union hockey. Crappy power plays, twin brothers who would rather try the old plays than changing their style, a non existent second line and up and down goaltending. Great one night, brutal the next.

Dale Weise should revel in his new role in Montreal and keep the trash talk to himself. It never looks good on a player to do this, as his current employers see that if his game slips and he is moved, he could very well do the same thing to them

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A 4th line depth player, barely in the lineup at all for us at the time, and definitely bench-worthy on a game-by-game basis, he whines about not playing in front of his family? Boo-hoo-hoo.

Good for him that he's having what will amount to a career year for him, but paying him more than his $1mil current salary will be a waste of time.

He was always overrated here, he was dead to me the instant he was dumped by us, well before this stupid article, and now I wish Lucic fulfills his old post-playoff threats.

Montreal's bloated franchise can have our washouts anyday.

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