Canucks' Rutherford: "We have a playoff team if everything goes right"

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Will the Vancouver Canucks host playoff games at Rogers Arena for the first time in nearly a decade next spring?

We’ll see, but Canucks president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford gave an answer that had fans talking on social media today.

Rutherford spoke to the media in Vancouver for the first time in eight months today. The 74-year-old executive has made a conscious decision to take a step back from speaking publicly in an apparent attempt to reduce the noise around his hockey team. Given his sometimes blunt answers, perhaps that was a wise move — much to the dismay of the local media.

But on the eve of training camp, Rutherford was present, along with GM Patrik Allvin and head coach Rick Tocchet at the introductory press conference to answer questions.

“I think we’re partway through it. There is still work to be done,” Rutherford said when asked about the trajectory of the franchise. “I mean, we haven’t even qualified for the playoffs yet. We’re trying to clean up some things. Every season you have to judge the management, coaches. That’s what we do in sports.”

And yes, he used the p-word. The Canucks last made the playoffs in 2020, but haven’t hosted postseason games in Vancouver since 2015.

“The changes that we made, we have a playoff team if everything goes right,” Rutherford added. “Your goalie has to be good, your specialty teams have to be good. You can’t get into a lot of injuries. I’m not saying if one of those things go wrong we can’t still make it, because we have some impact players that can win games by themselves. But we want to get to a point that we have enough to get our lineup that you can have a few things go wrong on a regular basis and overcome that. But to be frank, that’s my opinion.”

There are probably 32 teams in the NHL that think they can make the playoffs if “everything goes right,” but Rutherford isn’t off-base. The Canucks aren’t a favourite to make the playoffs, but there is a path to get there.

If they can get a full season of elite play from Thatcher Demko and improved defensive play under the guidance of Rick Tocchet, they should be better. There aren’t any sexy names among their new additions, but the sum of the parts could stabilize the team. And they need big years from their top offensive stars again.

And then there’s the penalty kill.

“As everybody knows, we had a number of shortcomings last year and we feel that we’ve improved some of the areas. We’ll see how much we’ve improved them,” Rutherford said. “But penalty killing was a sore spot. We’ve brought guys in that have success killing penalties over their career, and we hope they can come in and help us in that area. We changed our defence and the defence will be harder to play against. It’ll be a little bit different… Overall we’ve put ourselves in a stronger position, which isn’t that hard to do, we’re coming off an off-year.”

Rutherford alluded to the team’s long-running salary cap troubles. The Canucks had to give up a third-round pick in the Tanner Pearson trade, in an effort to sneak under the cap. Similarly, they gave up a second-rounder to shed Jason Dickinson’s salary before last season. And of course, there was the massive buyout of Oliver Ekman-Larsson in June.

“We’re not sitting here saying we’re where we need to be. We still have work to do. But based on what we had to deal with — we’re still working through the cap — we’ve almost got it unravelled, we’re probably a contract or two away from getting to where we want to be. And then we can really move forward the way we want to.”

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