“I want to win”: Cole believes Canucks can do something special
It would have been easy for Vancouver Canucks defenceman Ian Cole to coast for the rest of his career.
At 34 years old, Cole has already won two Stanley Cups and has managed to play 14 seasons in the NHL. According to CapFriendly, Cole has made an estimated $27 million while playing hockey.
But, according to Cole on the latest After Hours segment on Hockey Night in Canada, that isn’t enough for the Ann Arbour, Michigan native. He wants to win, and he wants to do it in Vancouver.
“I want to win,” Cole said. “This isn’t something that, you know, I wanna coast off into the sunset.
“With how motivated this team and how motivated [GM Patrick Alvin and president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford] are to put together a product on the ice that can win and win consistently over the course of the season and, hopefully, into the postseason, was very alluring to me to come here.”
The Canucks have been one of the best teams in the league this season. They got off to their best start in franchise history with a 12-3-1 record through the first 16 games. At the moment, they are second in the Western Conference with a 12-5-1 record and 25 points; that’s just two points behind the first-place Vegas Golden Knights.
Cole has been an important part of that success. Though he lacks the glitz and glamour of players like Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes, Cole has been a reliable depth defender.
His presence should start to shine even more as the Canucks are currently going through their first bout of adversity of the season. The team has now dropped two consecutive games this week, with a loss to the Calgary Flames on Thursday and to the Seattle Kraken on Saturday.
According to Cole, who won two cups with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2016 and 2017, this is all part of the process for a winning team.
“I think a little adversity is a good thing to kind of cement your game,” said Cole. “As of this year, things have gone very well. Are we hitting that first stretch of adversity right now? I don’t know; maybe we are, maybe we aren’t.
“Good teams are able to take that adversity, learn from it, grow from it, and flip that and move on, and hopefully we can do that.”
Heading into the season, almost nobody had the Canucks being among the league’s best teams in mid-November. Cole says that the players have been hard at work crafting an identity that can help them limit mistakes and continue to play at a high level.
“We want to be a team that’s mature enough to take a look at our game and say, ‘Hey, this part wasn’t good enough,'” said Cole. “I think the ability to take a step back, look at it objectively and say, ‘Hey, we need to fix this’ and then do that, will take us a long way.”
Cole and the rest of the Canucks will try to get back to their winning ways against the league-worst San Jose Sharks tomorrow night. The last time these two teams met was on November 2, when Vancouver bullied the Sharks in a 10-1 victory.
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