Cam Cole (Vancouver Sun) RIPS Mike Gillis and Canucks to Shreds - Defends Alain Vigneault

[nuck nit]

I generally agree that MG should get fired before AV, but who would we replace him with. Can't think of any good GM's who are out of work, can anyone else. Also I think not trading Luongo turned out to be a good thing.

[joecanada777]

article is written in hindsight. If he wrote this prior to the playoffs I give him credit, other then that, he's just like another 20/20 hindsight loser on canucks.com. On paper we had a good team.

[grandmaster]

He likes handing out these NTC like candies too, im afraid of what he will do in the offseason. He needs to go ASAP.

[bongo4420]

I'm sorry but the Canucks are one of the best teams in the NHL on paper.

You couldn't ask for more depth at center with Henrik, Kesler and Roy. Best 3 centers in the NHL, not even Pittsburgh has a 3rd line center that good, considering Roy is a 40-60 point producer.

We have gritty wingers and depth scorers who are up there with the league's best. Not many teams had so many 10-goal scorers this season.

Then look at our top-4 defence, on paper one of the best in the league, with arguably the best 3rd pairing in the league.

Then of course, the best goalie tandem in the league.

MG has done everything he physically can to build a winner, but what's gone wrong is on the ice and in the locker-room. It's the coaching staff's job to get the most out of their players, and they have for the most part during the regular season. Translating that to playoff success is NOT the general manager's job, but the coaches.

Again, it's not MG's fault that the powerplay is abysmal, despite having the Sedins, Kesler and Garrison on the same team.

[bongo4420]

How can you blame the owner? It is his team, he invested in it, without him you may not have a team. If you think about it he is a great owner. Why? This is his business and he is not invested as fan like you and me, and ticket prices have gone up which means he is making more money than before.

You think he is a bad owner because ticket prices are not lower? When the arena continues to sell out even as the prices have gone way up, why the heck would he consider lowering? Once they see a decline in ticket sales and non sellouts then they will then lower. He is a great businessman. You are thinking as a fan.

[sandman44]

The word is funereal, as in "The atmosphere in the Canucks room was shell-shocked, funereal".

[PeZzy]

Fire MG and AV!

AV is not a thinking man's coach but he has shown an ability to adapt a team to the talent he has to work with.

On the GM side - can't excuse these quick playoff exits and a declining hockey team. This team's main strength was its defence. I can understand letting Errorhoff go but that really hurt the team. Undervaluing a hobbling Sami Salo really put the nail in the coffin. We all watched as the team got worse. Ballard and Booth are burdens on the team.

I don't know why Ebbett is warming the bench with the big club as Schroeder was a much better center during the season.

Last year we thought...oh well...lost to the Cup winners. But two years in a row? Even if the Sharks win the Cup it is too much to bear. This team is clearly headed in a downward direction and Cam Cole knows this is a freefall.

Aquilini needs to slap himself silly for getting rid of Nonis and bringing in Gillis.

[RUPERTKBD]

he doesn't say AV shouldn't go, he said that MG is the main reason for the rapid decline of the Nucks, and he's right. It's been clear since the Boston series that the Nucks are easily intimidated and he's done zero to remedy that.......in fact, he's done less than zero

[MANGO]

FIRE EVERY ONE! Cam Cole is a born again CDCer. Who woulda thunk

[UFTcan]

Even though I am an avid AV hater..

No coach could of taken this roster far, not enough talent.

[aqua59]

Who, really, to blame for fall of the Canucks?

http://www.vancouver...4968/story.html

Cam Cole Vancouver Sun

Mike Gillis wasn’t around to be interviewed Monday, probably because he sensed the media’s eagerness for a post-mortem on his Vancouver Canucks, and it’s bad form to perform an autopsy on a corpse that’s still twitching.

But who’s kidding whom?

This series, and this season, and this Canuck era are all over.

For a lot of reasons — not the least of which is the coming realignment that will no longer allow them an exalted playoff seeding by virtue of sitting atop the weakest division in hockey — it is time to start getting used to how the other half lives.

Yes, Vancouver. Again.

There is only one way for an organization to remain strong while its core ages gracefully, a la the Detroit Red Wings, and that is with a constant replenishment of NHL-level talent that can grow into bigger roles as the stars begin to fade.

That will not happen with the Canucks, not soon enough, because the cupboard is, if not entirely bare, decidedly bereft of young impact players capable of curing the team’s No. 1 deficiency: a lack of offensive firepower.

To use the elegant analogy of Detroit’s Pavel Datsyuk: lots of piano movers, not many who actually play the instrument.

Henrik and Daniel Sedin are still there front and centre, superior human beings that they are, to answer nightly for the club’s impotence.

But without a lot more help than Gillis has given them in the way of a supporting cast, they are not going to be able to dominate games even remotely the way they once did.

And the San Jose Sharks — with ample assistance from a rulebook that has been allowed to slide back nearly to pre-2005 levels of permissible interference — have provided a pretty good road map, in building their 3-0 series lead, for future opponents to short-circuit the twins’ cycling, telepathic Sedinery.

Ryan Kesler has been hurt too often to hold out hope of ever seeing him return to his 41-goal, Selke-winning form of 2010-11. Moreover, he and Alex Burrows and Max Lapierre made such a bed of nails for themselves over the years with antagonistic behaviour and embellishment, it hardly matters if they’ve tried to reform — and Burrows, at least, has.

Kevin Bieksa’s artful skewering Monday of Sharks’ “so-called Canadians” Joe Thornton and especially Logan Couture for diving and overacting doesn’t change the fact that referees apparently have no intention of ever looking at the three Canucks with an unjaundiced eye. When they’re on the ice, the calls will always tend to go the other way.

“We’re the embellishers,” Vigneault said Monday, stone-faced. The question mark was implied.

Meanwhile, Canuck management is carrying a plethora of albatrosses into the off-season — roughly $13.8 million worth of wasted contracts with Roberto Luongo twiddling his thumbs, Keith Ballard evidently consigned to the discard heap and the ever-injured, grossly overrated David Booth taking up space — and unless Gillis can go, cap in hand, to owner Francesco Aquilini and ask him to buy out a couple of them, and eat some of Luongo’s salary in order to move him, they will be hamstrung when they try to re-stock the shelves.

And wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall when that conversation takes place?

So far, we haven’t come to anything that’s Alain Vigneault’s fault, unless you think a sterner hand, earlier, by the head coach would have broken Burrows and Lapierre and Kesler of their thespian tendencies.

Sunday night’s third-period meltdown by Cory Schneider — in a game that, arguably, might have been Luongo’s to lose, based on his play in the first two — obscured a whole lot of other ills, most glaringly the lack of scoring, but also the utter invisibility of any number of forwards who’ve been exposed next to the dynamic, deep and muscular cast of the Sharks.

But really, it’s a little late now to be terribly outraged about the demise of the Canucks, because the die was cast last summer.

That’s when (we only found out much later) they were already all but certain that Manny Malhotra wasn’t going to make it back yet made no provision for the day when they’d have no one who could win a faceoff, let alone anchor a decent third line.

It’s when they didn’t trade Luongo, gambling that the market was going to improve if they held onto him. No one could have predicted how abjectly that gamble would fail, or how the consequences of that failure would dog the team all season long.

And then, at the trade deadline, Gillis’s cure for the lack of scoring depth was to trade for Derek Roy, another smurf centre for an organization that is fairly teeming with them. The Sharks have brushed Roy aside like a mosquito, as surely as they, or any other sizable playoff opponent, would have dismissed Jordan Schroeder or Andrew Ebbett.

The expression on Vigneault’s face after Game 3, the redness in his eyes, said: “I’m all out of ideas.”

The atmosphere in the Canucks’ room was shell-shocked, funereal.

“There’s not much to draw from right now,” said Luongo, who didn’t allow a goal in his 15:53 of relief work and looked as though he might bite a hole in his tongue when someone asked if he felt he should have started the game.

“There are not many positives in the first three games,” he said. “There are a couple of guys who are playing their hearts out. Other than that …”

And still we search in vain for the compelling reason to fire Vigneault that’s such a popular theme as this team’s era of excellence winds down, and Gillis’s loyal cornermen try to misdirect the responsibility.

Anyone who thinks that arranging the forward lines differently, or changing the defence pairs, or putting this player or that out on the ice at the end of a game would have made the difference is dreaming in Technicolor.

Not that coaching doesn’t have an impact; it surely does. Not that there isn’t some truth to the idea that after seven seasons, a fresh voice, some fresh ideas, can sometimes be a tonic to a group that’s lost its way.

But let’s not insult anyone’s intelligence: Scotty Bowman couldn’t have won a Cup with this outfit.

Not this year.

Thoughts?

[EmployeeoftheMonth]

Hodgson was AVs fault not MGs

[Gally]

Hodgson was Hodgsons fault.

It's time for AV to go but that's not one of the reasons.

[smackyo23]

FIREAV

AV's eyes weren't red because he was out of ideas. They were red because he knows he's getting fired for being incompetent. Keep putting Ballard in the pressbox and ripping him publically for making a few mistakes after he played great at the beginning of the season. Yes, let that happen when Bieksa has been incredibly inconsistent the entire season. Never send a message to Bieksa. Keep him in there and never hold him accountable. Good riddance to AV. He has always played favourites and it has cost this team.

I wish we had an offensive coach that would have used Grabner and Hodgson properly (i like Kassian too). AV would always be complaining about Grabner's defensive play, but do you know who I saw on the PK against the Pens yesterday? Grabner. AV doesn't appreciate pure offensive skill. He just likes to hate on them. So glad to see him gone.

It always cracked me up when AV or MG ( I can't remember which one) said that the Hodgson was playing protected minutes which is why he was producing points at a pretty good level. What a load of nonsense. If it was the protected minutes, why don't they do that with any of our other players? Oh yeah, they can't shoot like hodgson.

[CroSen]

He is absolutely right. I wrote a few times on these boards that the "cupboard is bare." I tought Roy was a good acquisition, however I did not do my homework enough on him - only 1 goal in 20 playoff games? We needed offence, and yet he went with an assesst that couldn't score.

The goaltending is a mess, however that in part is AV's fault as Luongo should have played the whole series.

[BenDrinkin]

I liked what Gillis did with the Canucks, certain moves undoubtedly got us to the finals, but now things are looking bad. I could live with him staying on or being fired.