"Lot of bad habits": Rutherford has no answers for Canucks' woes

For better or for worse, Vancouver Canucks president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford has never been one afraid to speak his mind.

But with his team failing to win even once in their first six contests this year, Rutherford admitted that well, he doesn’t quite know what to say about his club.

“I’m the same as the fans and everybody. It’s getting frustrating, it’s hard to watch,” Rutherford said on Hockey Night in Canada’s After Hours program on Saturday night.

To his credit, Rutherford recognized the structural flaws with the Canucks, who have scored more than three goals just once on the season, while being outscored 27-16 thus far.

“We didn’t have a very good camp and it’s carried over into the season. We have a lot of bad habits,” Rutherford added.

But along with Patrik Allvin and Bruce Boudreau, it’s on Rutherford and the Canucks’ front office team to figure out some sort of solution, and quickly.

On Saturday, Vancouver was booed off the ice following a 5-1 loss to Buffalo, with jerseys tossed. Boudreau called both the effort and the jersey toss “embarrassing,” as did forward Conor Garland.

But how do you solve a problem like a winless hockey club? There’s no magic switch to flip.

There’s no hotshot prospect or goalie waiting in the wings to save the team. Surely owner Francesco Aquilini doesn’t want to fire anyone this early if he can avoid it. Hell, even a major trade isn’t likely to go down — what other trading partner are you likely to find making a shakeup less than two weeks into the season?

Rutherford was also candid about the team’s issues with injuries to defencemen Quinn Hughes, Tucker Poolman, Travis Dermott, and Riley Stillman.

“When you have injuries, you’ve got to have next man up and have to be ready to go. I believe if our team has a really strong structure, you can play through those things,” Rutherford said. “When you start talking about injuries, you’re admitting you’re a losing team. I don’t like it. I don’t like using that as an excuse. We all have to be better. We have to use the players we’ve got and we have to play within a stronger structure to make that game easier.”

Lots of questions, but very few answers.

The After Hours conversation with Rutherford then shifted to the idea of everyone’s least favourite word in the Vancouver market: rebuild.

“I think people have to realize how long rebuilds are,” Rutherford said in a line that could’ve come at any point in the past decade from a Canucks management figure. “You look at some of the teams that went through it and we look at them now and how good they are now, but there were a lot of tough years. We may very well be in a rebuild in the direction that we’re going, but ideally, we’d like to transition this team on the fly.”

Whatever direction the Canucks are going, Rutherford can only hope for his sake that it stops sometime soon.

“We do have some core players, some young players that are really good, and these guys just need to keep working and try to work through this at this point. But we will continue to add younger players to this team and bring it together in the next year or so.”

The Canucks aren’t very good right now.

But they might be in the next year or so. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

For now, Vancouver can only look to win one game a time. Their next chance will be when they play host to the 3-1-1 Carolina Hurricanes on Monday night, with puck drop set for a 7:30 pm PT start.

You might also like:
• "Just totally embarrassing": Boudreau on Canucks fans tossing jerseys