Patrick Johnston: The Canucks seems like a team that needs more alpha-male types in their dressing room.
These men are who they are. This is who they’ve always been.
They’re highly paid professional athletes who have been able to coexist for more than five years and there’s no real reason to think they can’t go on coexisting, no matter what water may be flowing under the bridge.
Both were alpha male types. Outspoken. Pointed. They had that way of talking that captures the attention of their peers. There weren’t the team captains but they were social leaders, the guys who helped build the team’s cultural atmosphere.
Brad Richardson’s comments this week about how he’d told Miller during Richardson’s late-season cameo with the Canucks in 2021-22 that Miller was too hard on Pettersson, that he’d lose him if he kept on him got me thinking how a more permanent member of the team might be able to tamp down Miller’s apparent instinct to get on his highly skilled teammate.
Did Cole and Zadorov play something of a counterbalance to that last season? When you talk to people around the team, that’s a vibe you get. The room was more multipolar in its culture. That was something that was talked about a lot, by Cole and Zadorov, but also by others. It was a group that was engaged with each other in keeping each other accountable; that has not been much of a talking point this season and more and more that hits home.
Think back to the 2019-20 season, Miller’s first in Vancouver. Obviously the new guy on the block isn’t going to be speaking in the same way as a player who has been here for years — and certainly what he says lands differently when it’s the first or second time as opposed to the 50th or 60th time — but it is notable how forceful the leadership in that room was. There were vocal personalities like Chris Tanev, Jacob Markstrom, Antoine Roussel and Bo Horvat.
The key to all those voices was they were leading players. It’s important to have some strong personalities in your depth roles, but it’s especially important to have strong personalities in your leading roles, too. Cole was something of the former, but Zadorov emerged as something of the latter.
And there’s just doesn’t seem to be enough of that right now.