Top-Shelf Takes: Canucks at a crossroads again after dismal early season start

Another early slide threatens to derail the Canucks season.

Welcome to Top-Shelf Takes, a weekly series from staff writer Mary Clarke all about the NHL. Lace up your skates as we dive deep into the epic highs and lows of this little sport called hockey.

The Vancouver Canucks certainly have to be wishing for a reset button right about now.

We’re just a few weeks into the 2022-23 NHL season and the Canucks (0-5-2) still have yet to get themselves into the win column. As the NHL’s only remaining winless team, you’d expect the results to not be pretty by virtue of their lack of wins. Of course, with Vancouver being Vancouver, these last few weeks have been an excruciating ordeal as the Canucks bungled leads in five of their seven losses to start the season.

So yeah, the vibes in Vancouver are extremely poor right now. Poor enough that Canucks fans booed their team — and tossed a jersey on the ice to match — after losing their home opener 5-1 to the Buffalo Sabres on Sunday.

#Canucks booed off the ice, in their home opener. Absolutely incredible scenes at Rogers Arena tonight.

They’re 0-4-2 after six games. Only team in the NHL without a win, a week and a half into the season. pic.twitter.com/2WsCvCwh04

— Rob Williams (@RobTheHockeyGuy) October 23, 2022

And if that wasn’t enough, the team has been ravaged by injuries with Quinn Hughes out week-to-week, Brock Boeser out day-to-day, and Tucker Poolman sitting on the injured reserve list. Seriously, if there was a reset button on the season the Canucks surely would have hit it by now.

Unfortunately for the Canucks, general manager Patrik Allvin, and team president Jim Rutherford, this is the cold, stark reality for Vancouver.

The good (comforting?) news here is that the Canucks have been in this position before. Last year, in fact, when the team started the season 8-15-2 before the team fired Jim Benning and Travis Green and replaced them with Allvin and Bruce Boudreau respectively. Once Boudreau took over, the Canucks played at a 106-point pace, going 32-15-10 but missing the playoffs at the end of the season.

This year, however, was supposed to be different. Many believed a full season of Boudreau at the helm would have allowed him to work his magic once more. After all, Elias Pettersson, J.T. Miller, and Hughes had career years under his tutelage just one season ago. And now, this disastrous start to the season has the Canucks upper management mentioning a rebuild in the public press!

“We may very well be in a rebuild in the direction we’re going” https://t.co/r3cIPaHrh1

— Jeff Marek (@JeffMarek) October 23, 2022

Look, the beginning of this season was always going to be a bit bumpy for the Canucks considering they started the year on a five-game road trip. It’s never easy playing long stretches of time away from your home barn; ask the New York Islanders how well that went for them last year if you want a reminder.

And yet, the Canucks fumbled away multi-goal leads four times out of their seven losses and have been outscored 15-2 in third periods this season. That’s flat out unacceptable from a team with playoff aspirations and it may just cost them a postseason spot down the line as well.

It’s hard to say what the right course of action is for the Canucks. Firing Boudreau would leave the Canucks with two head coaching changes in under a calendar year. Boudreau isn’t even a bad head coach either and much of the Canucks failings this year can hardly be put at his feet. A heavy-duty trade is possible, if only to help alleviate the strain on the team’s mediocre and injury-riddled defense.

Or, the Canucks could finally pull the chute on this team’s core and go full rebuild if they truly believe this situation isn’t worth saving. Either way, something has to give for this Canucks team that’s been saddled with too many bad contracts for too long. Bandages and patch jobs just won’t work anymore with this team.