Bruce Boudreau lamented in his later days how he’d struggled to connect with his players. Rick Tocchet is starting to sound like an echo.
If it makes you feel any better, fans have been booing the Leafs off the ice in Toronto.
It seems that there’s a lot of underwhelming hockey going on around the league these days.
So you’re not alone, Canucks fans. Not that this makes you feel any better.
This season, not so much. And the prognosis isn’t terribly complicated: the defence corps has underwhelmed, but also his team as a whole is executing badly.
There are moments in the offensive zone where his forwards keep making bad reads. They’re hesitating to cut to the middle. They’re not moving their feet enough.
If ever there were an illustration of what the Canucks aren’t doing, it was to watch Kyle Connor tear the Canucks apart on Tuesday night. Now there’s a forward who knows how to keep the motor running.
The tone, in the end, is on the team’s best players. And those are the same players who were here when Bruce Boudreau was the coach and he was lamenting an inability to connect with his players in a way that would coax better results than he was getting.
Now, there were technical problems with Boudreau’s game. We can see that literally in the statistical record after Tocchet took over. The penalty kill quickly got better. The five-on-five defensive play got better too.
As Tocchet and his assistant Adam Foote went along, they started to build out the team’s systems play. And it made for good results last year. Not really because of the systems themselves — there’s no big mystery on offence, either you’ve got the horse to score or you don’t, and we thought the Canucks had the horses — but rather it’s about building patterns of success and seeing player confidence snowball because of it.
There’s been none of that this season.
Rather, we’ve seen low-confidence players too often. And it’s all very reminiscent of the end of the Boudreau era, and, really the end of the Travis Green era.
Tocchet talked about the culture shift his players needed to undergo when he first arrived two years ago. It did seem like that had happened last season. But that shift now seems gone. It’s back to the old ways, the ones that set in over season upon season of missing the playoffs.
The bulk of this team’s leadership core has been here for six years. Maybe it’s just time to shift away from that core and try something new.
As I wrote on the weekend, Pat Quinn saw this same problem in 1991. His team’s mentality was wrong — and so he got on with it.
Maybe it’s time to do that here.