Welcome Matt: Rutherford's persistent criticism of Boudreau not a good look for Canucks

Bruce Boudreau deserves better.

The Vancouver Canucks coach is not without his flaws, but the persistent criticism from his bosses led to some alarming public exchanges Tuesday as the team prepared for a game in Ottawa.

One day after president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford went on local radio to blast the team’s structure (again), the coach fired back.

“Listen I’m not going to get into an argument over whether we do or whether we don’t (play with enough structure),” he said. “We play as hard as we can, as well as we can and we lay it all out on the line every night.”

The coach said his competitive fire has been lit, and that he’s going to add this chapter to the book he plans to write. He also made an overture to the dressing room, hoping the players are “angered” by the criticism.

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Rutherford made a strategic error yesterday. He had success calming the market with straight talk in the past, but what he failed to realize is that Canucks fans blame management and owner Francesco Aquilini more than Boudreau for the team’s awful start.

He failed to land a defencemen this offseason and doubled down on the core by re-signing J.T. Miller. Management hired the assistant coaches, and the general manager fired the analyst, Rachel Doerrie, who was supposed to link analytics department with the coaching staff.

They set this coaching staff up for failure, and now Rutherford sounds like a whiner.

If the coach is that bad, then fire the coach.

If ownership won’t let you fire the coach, then make it clear it’s either him or you.

That’s what leaders do.

But 11 months — not even a year — after you were brought in to get the franchise back on the rails, the Canucks are arguably worse-run and in worse shape going forward.

At this point, you wonder if this year will be the year they should’ve had last year. That this season will be about proving to the owner that his hand-picked coach was the wrong guy by management, and that the team does need to rebuild.

And if this does become a case of tear-down, get-younger, accumulate-draft-picks, then we all will have wasted a year, and that’s after wasting most of the last decade.