Memo to Canucks fans: Be afraid. Be very afraid
Cam Cole, Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, April 16, 2008
We always knew this day was coming, that this outcome was possible. It was ownership's first test.
You be the judge whether Francesco Aquilini and his brothers passed or failed.
Forget the public persona Aquilini presented Tuesday while making it official that Dave Nonis is gone as the general manager of the Vancouver Canucks. That's mere cosmetics.
Sure, you'd like to think that the owner of your favourite sports team might be able to express a thought that wasn't written down by one of his public relations flacks, or answer a question without recycling one of the many catch-words from his prepared text -- like "sustainability" and "leadership," neither of which he seemed to know how to define.
Yes, the explanation for firing Nonis would be easier to swallow (a media wag pointed out Tuesday) if the owner hadn't borrowed his rationale from Spider-Man. "With great power," Peter Parker's dying Uncle Ben told Spidey's alter-ego, "comes great responsibility." Aquilini -- or his speechwriter -- didn't even credit the source.
And yes, you'd like to think he'd have a better answer to the question of what style of hockey he wanted the new administration to adopt than: "My favourite style is winning."
And it would have been more satisfying if he could have come up with any reason for firing Nonis other than "we didn't make the playoffs, and Canuck fans deserve better."
Deserve? Says who?
Let's be honest: the first test was always going to be about money, and that's all there is to this story: at issue was the few million dollars the Canucks' owners failed to rake in because their team missed out on two playoff dates, which is all they were going to get even if they had managed to squeak in.
A few million dollars which -- compared to the enormous pool of revenue the newly certified keepers of the Canuck commercial juggernaut have squeezed so thoroughly from every private and corporate pore in the Lower Mainland and beyond -- is such a drop in the bucket, it makes you cringe to think what the knee-jerk reaction might entail if they ever lose some real money.
A few million dollars was left on the table by the Nonis administration, and the Aquilinis swung the axe. As if Nonis personally stole the money that rightfully belonged in the family till.
So now we know. We couldn't tell until things went a little sour, but now we know.
Be afraid, Canuck fans. Be very afraid.
Your team's owners have hit the first pothole in their path to untold riches, and unless we are very much mistaken, they have punched the panic button without having a hot clue how to proceed from here.
"We operate many successful businesses," Aquilini said ... as if the Canucks were an unsold apartment, and Nonis was a lazy building superintendent, or a low-grossing sales manager.
Well, maybe that's what owners do. It's their cash cow, why shouldn't they have the family brand on it?
They didn't ask for Dave Nonis, they inherited him from John McCaw, so they want their own man on the job, and that man will want his own coach, so no doubt Alain Vigneault is on borrowed time. And therefore, so are his assistants, and so on down the line. Presumably, the scouts will not escape a hard examination of the Canucks' recent draft record, nor should they.
Three seasons, Nonis got.
It's not much, but there is no denying the club missed the playoffs two of his three years in charge, and did so ignobly both times. The notion that a hockey club should get a little better each year or expect to be asked why, is not unreasonable. This one finished with the fewest points of any Canuck team in nine seasons.
The middle season of Nonis's three -- with the novelty of Roberto Luongo's big-time goaltending providing the team an adrenalin rush -- may have been the natural bounce that comes after being dropped from a great height, or it may have been the real thing. We'll never know, because that team is history.
There are all kinds of reasons the Canucks took a huge step backward this year, the biggest one -- crippling injuries on defence -- being absolutely no fault of Dave Nonis. But some of the reasons were his fault, or at least they occurred on his watch, which amounts to the same thing.
Nonis had control over the scouts, and approved their draft choices. If nothing very significant came out of the draft in the way of scoring forwards during his time as their boss, that's on him. The forwards he added last summer, Brad Isbister and Byron Ritchie, were non-entities. Almost anyone could have told him they would be.
He gambled that he had the inside track on Peter Forsberg, and lost. He stood pat at the trade deadline.
He had to guess how much Markus Naslund had left in the tank when he gave him three years at $6 million per season, and overshot by two years.
He laughed -- almost anyone would have -- at suggestions that to get a big-time scoring forward at the deadline, he might have to give up the Sedins. A few months later, they have everyone wondering. He thought they would learn from last year's playoffs, and was wrong. He was not alone, but he was in charge.
Nonis had the final say on giving Luongo all the time he wanted at the all-star break to go home and see his wife, even permitting him to miss a regular-season start. In hindsight, benefit of which Nonis didn't have when he gave the okay, it was the beginning of the goalie's downward spiral.
Absentee players' families, like absentee owners, are bad news. You can't make a player move his family to the city where he plays, but you don't have to indulge him, either, if he chooses to be a long-distance hubbie. Unless he's giving the money back.
Even so, no one expected Luongo to break down when he was needed most. We're all guilty of failing to predict that. But not all of us are out of a job today.
Nonis won't be, for long.
He's a good man, and a loyal one, and if another team doesn't call, Brian Burke probably will -- either from Anaheim or Toronto, where the Hogtown scribes are convinced he can't possibly resist the siren song from the Centre of the Universe.
Nonis's successor, meanwhile, will inherit a team with cap room, a fast-developing goaltender on the farm, and a surplus of defencemen with which to barter for offensive help, thanks to Alex Edler falling out of the sky last year.
Who, exactly, is that successor? The choice will tell us more about the Aquilinis, about their tastes, about their willingness to hire a competent man and then leave him alone. Or it will tell us whether anyone with credibility will sign up for the chance to work for owners this intrusive, this impulsive.
Meanwhile, it's well within their rights to adopt "Off with their heads!" as the ownership slogan. They're paying the bills.
But let's see who answers the help-wanted advertisement, knowing what we know now.
ccole@png.canwest.com
QUOTE, UNQUOTE: AQUILINI SPEAKS:
We've got a great foundation. I think we can build on it and it's going to be the challenge of the new GM to provide that.
Leadership is vision. You have to have a vision where you want to go, have to have the support group around you to get you there.
It's about quality people committed to what they're doing, people who serve the organization, who care, who get the job done.
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