Home Record
Fixing Problems
- Beat themselves at home; 2 out of 3 games this season
- Don’t play with the same urgency at home
- Seem to be more comfortable on the road
- Get a lot of days off and don’t play well when they don’t practice
- Have some adjustments to make; are fixable
- Need to fix these things quick
- Can’t be a playoff team with their home record
Canucks As Contenders
- Patience for the front office and coaching staff are two different things
- Tocchet does a terrific job and has been dealt a different hand
- Tocchet will figure this out
- Front office will have to start to make decisions
- Talk every day about making the team better and what changes they might have to make; are at that period now
Window of Contention
- Took a big step last year; a bigger step than anyone thought they could take in one season
- Key is to maintain what they did last season
- Lost some good players but have added some good players
- Have dealt with a number of issues; all teams have to do it too
- Need to get everyone in place and settle down
- Certainly a good enough team to be a playoff team and will see where they go from there
Boeser
- Can’t go to Costco and pick-up 1 or 2 players that can help you
- Living in a cap world and hard to make deals
- Need to add a couple of players to really give themselves a chance to content
Tocchet
- Will deal with Boeser, at the trade deadline, when the time comes
- Are evaluating his situation
- The key is what the term looks like
- Like all contracts, player will have a different opinion than the team does
- Will continue to watch this really close
Miller
- Knew him really well from Pittsburgh
- Handled some of the tougher situations, in Pittsburgh, for Mike Sullivan
- Knew how he would be as a head coach because they watched him in Arizona
- Good communicator
Lankinen
- When a player asks for a reset you always give them that time
- You work at this business to do the best you can but also have to realize these are people and everyone has issues to deal with at certain times
- When a player reaches out for help, you give them the time off
- Been a long career so he can’t remember every situation but does believe this has happened to him before
- 15 years ago they weren’t as well equipped to handle this
- Didn’t have all the tools that they have now
- Has given players some time away; maybe not a month but a week or a few days
- Happens all the time; a lot more than people think
- Miller requested the time and it was for personal reasons
- I get that the sports world makes up trade rumours but when a player is on leave for personal reasons, it’s very disrespectful without any information to start rumours
Sherwood
- Not surprised that he has played well
- Had a goalie situation that was tough
- Lankinen overplayed his hand in free agency
- Marko Torenious was with Lankinen everyday and they told him to talk to Lankinen every day so the Canucks know exactly what he’s doing
- Were keeping an eye on him for about a month
- Possible to keep both Demko and Lankinen
- Don’t know Lankinen’s next contract but need goaltending to win
- Willing to put a little bit more money on the goaltending side than they would somewhere else
- Has been everything they’ve asked for
- Were looking for that type of players
- Lafferty brought a little bit of that last season; Sherwood brings more
- Can play up and down the line-up
- Drives the game some nights