Brock Boeser really thought his team had learned something last season.
But even those walks aren’t enough these days, given the struggles of his team.
After Thursday night’s devastating loss to the Los Angeles Kings, Boeser said he couldn’t sleep.
“You just keep thinking about it,” the veteran winger said Friday, a day after his team struggled yet again on Thursday, dropping a 5-1 loss to the Kings.
Boeser has been a Canuck for eight years. His team’s current struggles pain him. He thought the days of bad nights, of disappointment at the end of the season, were behind them.
It’s eating him up.
“It doesn’t feel good, nope,” he said.
This team, he knows, knows how to win. Just look at how they played last Saturday, defeating the Toronto Maple Leafs in pretty impressive fashion. They won games like that with great consistency all last season and battled hard into the playoffs.
“We went through it. We battled our asses off all season last year, including in the playoffs, and then come and have something like this? It feels like we haven’t learned anything from what we went through … but we did. And we all know better,” he said.
“It’s hard. And we haven’t clicked, and you can feel the little disconnects. We have to connect as a group, and come together and have each other’s backs and play to our systems and play for each other,” he said.
Boeser knows he can be better. He scored 40 goals last year, proving a point he always wanted to prove — that he can be a top goal scorer in this league, and stay healthy for a full season to boot.
He’s kept scoring this year — remember the flurry around Christmas, six goals in four games? — but has just one goal in his last eight.
“We have expectations and we definitely haven’t lived up to them,” he said. “A lot of guys haven’t, including myself. I expect better from myself.”
The good news, he thinks, is when they do figure themselves out, the current funk hasn’t wrecked their playoff hopes.
“Let’s be real, if we can turn it around, we’re only two points out, one point out. That just shows how good we can actually be,” he said. “Even the fact that we’re going through this terrible patch right now, we’re still right there. It’s still something. We’ve got to look at that and see that. I feel like we can push through this. … There have been distractions. It’s been an interesting year.”
“We haven’t been consistent in our mindset,” he went on. “We just have to really put our hard hats on right now. We got to come to the rink and each guy has to find our identity. I feel like we lost our identity a bit. Look in the mirror at what we, each individual person, needs to do to help our team win.”