"It was the wrong decision": Messier reflects on time as Canucks captain

One of the greatest players of all-time, Mark Messier has a lot to be proud of in his Hall of Fame career.

With 1,887 points, he sits behind only Wayne Gretzky and Jaromir Jagr in all-time NHL scoring. He won six Stanley Cups, five with the Edmonton Oilers, and one with the New York Rangers, as well as three Canada Cups for Team Canada.

The 63-year-old is a two-time winner of the Hart Trophy as NHL MVP, doing it while Gretzky and Mario Lemieux were in their prime, no less. He won the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP when the Oilers won their first Stanley Cup in 1984.

And then there’s the Vancouver experience.

Messier left New York in the summer of 1997, signing a three-year, $18 million contract with the Canucks. His $6 million annual salary made him the second-highest-paid player in the league, behind Lemieux.

Messier was coming off an 84-point season and had 99 points the year before that. But he was also 36 years old.

Though the Canucks had just missed the playoffs by four points the season prior with a 35-40-7 record, Messier was brought to Vancouver to help deliver a Stanley Cup.

Two years earlier, the Canucks had acquired Alexander Mogilny. Pavel Bure, who battled injuries for the previous two seasons, was finally healthy again. Many of the core players from the 1994 Stanley Cup finalist team still remained, including Trevor Linden,  Kirk McLean, Jyrki Lumme, Dave Babych, Bret Hedican, Dana Murzyn, and Gino Odjick.

But in hindsight, talk of a Stanley Cup in 1997 was delusional.

“It was a great learning experience for me,” Messier said in an exclusive interview with Daily Hive. “When I went to Vancouver… the expectations were a Stanley Cup but the reality was the team was in a rebuild. Balancing that expectation with the reality in that market was something that needed to be dealt with.”

Messier on joining the #Canucks in 1997 pic.twitter.com/mXa5scXTEA

— Rob Williams (@RobTheHockeyGuy) February 9, 2024

Longtime president and GM Pat Quinn was fired in November of Messier’s first season in Vancouver after a 3-10-2 start. Head coach Tom Renney soon followed him out the door. Mike Keenan was brought in, and many long-tenured players were sent packing throughout the season; the rebuild was on.

The Canucks finished the 1997-98 season with 64 points, third-worst in the NHL standings. They were even worse the following year, tallying 58 points.

But they did take a step forward in 1999-2000, putting together an 83-point season, missing the playoffs by four points. It was the final season before players like Markus Naslund, Todd Bertuzzi, Brendan Morrison, Ed Jovanovski, and Mattias Ohlund took the team back to the playoffs.

While members of the old guard may have butted heads with Messier, Naslund credited the former captain with helping him.

“I know that [Messier has] taken a lot of heat in this organization, because he had to take the brunt of the problems when we didn’t play well. He taught us a lot, because we were a young group and he had won a bunch of times,” Naslund said in an interview late in his Canucks career. “The one thing I always respect with Mark is how he cared about each and every one of us, whether it was a rookie or a veteran. And how he wanted the team to be close and play for one another.”

Messier: “I created a lot of great friendships”

Messier admitted that he couldn’t view his time in Vancouver as a “positive” experience, given the team missed the playoffs in each of his three years with the Canucks. But it wasn’t completely negative in his eyes.

“I created a lot of great friendships and players that I played with reach out to me to this day and say how thankful they were for the experience that we shared together, and how I was able to help them,” Messier said.

“Those are always the most important things to a player. So as disappointing as it was to go there and never make the playoffs… there was a lot of work to be done that ultimately set the tone for the team… Hopefully [I] had something to do with creating a culture where some of the young guys, a bunch of them became the leaders of that team… If I was able to help those players in any way become better players, better leaders, that’s gratifying.”

Naslund became the Canucks’ leading scorer during the Messier era and later blossomed into the NHL’s most outstanding player, as voted by his peers in 2003.

“[Naslund] came to Vancouver… trying to find his game, and probably more importantly trying to find his confidence to play at that level,” Messier said. “Oftentimes we spend all our time thinking about our game from a skill perspective or whatnot, and we forget about we gotta figure out how we’re able to play the game from the mental side. So that was interesting to see him evolve. And credit to him to put the work in, and he became one of the league’s best players throughout his career. A great, great player, wanted to be great, put the work in, and had an amazing career because of it.”

“It’s hard to unseat a sitting captain”

In a 2021 interview with NBC, Messier was asked what he would have done differently in Vancouver, if he was given a do-over in 1997.

He said he wouldn’t have taken the C off Linden.

“If I had to do it again I would have not have accepted the captaincy and tried to do it in a different way. I think that’s probably the thing I’d change the most,” Messier told Sean Leahy.

He expanded on that thought during the conversation with Daily Hive.

“I would never have done that again because it’s hard to unseat a sitting captain,” Messier said, referring to Linden. “He obviously had some very loyal support from the city, the players, the organization because of what they were able to accomplish.

“There were some problems internally in the team that the organization wanted to try to help. And I think, collectively, everybody thought that that change could help that. Unfortunately, it was the wrong decision by everybody. I should have come in and led from behind and supported Trevor and tried to fix the internal problems that existed in a different way.

“Hindsight’s 20/20. You live and learn. But I think even more importantly than that is that the expectations that the team had, that were Stanley Cup… what was being sold to the fans wasn’t anywhere near what the reality was. That was more of a challenge.”

Messier is back with Lay’s

Messier, who now works as an analyst in the United States for ESPN, will soon be getting airtime in Canada.

For the first time in 10 years, Messier is back as a spokesperson with Lay’s, starring in a new potato chip ad that will debut during the Super Bowl.

“Betcha can’t name a more recognizable duo than Lay’s potato chips and Mark Messier,” said Jess Spaulding, chief marketing officer of PepsiCo Foods Canada, in a media release.

The new campaign is called “Betcha can’t pick just one,” which is a spin-off of Messier’s legendary “Betcha can’t eat just one” television commercials that began in the 1990s.

“I loved them. I loved everything about them,” Messier said about the old ads. “The pylons, the hockey reference. Every Canadian knows all about the pylons… I was proud of the work that we did.”

The commercials were so popular that Messier had people coming up to him often referencing the popular ads.

“You’d think after all these years it would be forgotten,” he said.

“I was down in the Tortola (British Virgin Islands) fishing in my boat, got a refill and the guy looked at me and goes ‘You’re the chip man!’ He didn’t recognize me as a hockey player, but saw the chip commercials.”

Here’s a sneak peek at the new Super Bowl ad.

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