VANCOUVER – Authority, like water, flows downward.
In the history of the National Hockey League, a general manager has never fired a president.
Sometimes an owner may fire both. But since Luigi Aquilini’s family, which owns the Vancouver Canucks, still trusts Jim Rutherford to preside over the entirety of hockey operations, there was an inevitability to Thursday’s dismissal of general manager Patrik Allvin after one of the worst National Hockey League seasons in franchise history.
Widely varying insider reports in recent weeks had the Canucks poised to fire everybody — or nobody. But as the team burned to the ground in mid-winter, the most likely scenario was always that Rutherford, the Hockey Hall-of-Famer, would stay, and Allvin, his hand-picked, first-time GM, would go.
Head coach Adam Foote? Well, Rutherford said during his enthralling press conference Friday that the next general manager will eventually decide on the coaching staff — and almost everything else in hockey-ops.
Assistant general manager Ryan Johnson, a holdover from previous GM Jim Benning’s regime who impressed Rutherford long before Johnson built the Canucks’ minor-league team into a Calder Cup champion, is the frontrunner to replace Allvin.
As with the probable dismissal of Allvin, the potential promotion of Johnson has been whispered about for months.
Rutherford told reporters the Canucks did not refuse the Nashville Predators’ permission to interview Johnson for their own vacant GM job. Because they never asked.
“Somebody made that story up,” he said.
And no, the Canucks won’t grant permission for Johnson to talk to other teams until Rutherford concludes his own GM search.
In the meantime, Rutherford told Allvin, highly respected around the NHL for his scouting and player-development chops, that he is welcome to stay with the Canucks in a lesser capacity.
“I’ll give him a little time to make that decision,” Rutherford said. “It’s very emotional now.”
Other than the marketing impossibility of bringing back everyone after a 58-point season in which the Canucks won nine of 41 home games for their season-ticket holders, there wasn’t any one reason to fire Allvin.
Even if you aggregated the reasons, listing all of management’s biggest errors over the last four years, it would still be difficult to separate Allvin from Rutherford for blame.
This reality was not lost on Rutherford Friday.
“I think that’s a fair comment,” Rutherford said. “In my position, I do have to make some decisions, but he was in charge of most of the things in hockey, making the trades and deciding who’s getting called up and down, and working with the coach and all those things. (But) I take full responsibility for the season. I head up the hockey department, but I don’t make decisions for other people. And Patrik had the opportunity to make his own decisions.”
Asked near the end of his 33-minute press conference to grade himself, Rutherford said: “I’m not going to put a letter on it. I’m telling you that I’m disappointed. And, you know, I’m disappointed that I couldn’t have done a better job in some areas and made this work a little bit quicker. But I will say we’ve dealt with some situations over the last couple of years that I did not expect to deal with when I came here, and we’ve worked our way through it. They’re behind us now, and I don’t foresee any of those big issues to deal with going forward. So the team should be OK.”
Interestingly, the 77-year-old president also made it clear he will be less involved in hockey decisions with the next GM. Rutherford mentored and promoted Allvin, 51, when he was managing the Pittsburgh Penguins to a pair of Stanley Cups a decade ago.
And four years ago, shortly after Canucks managing owner Francesco Aquilini showed up on Rutherford’s doorstep in Raleigh, N.C., and convinced him to come out of “retirement,” Rutherford poached Allvin from the Penguins and made him the first Swedish general manager in the NHL.
“He’s a friend of mine,” Rutherford said. “I think Patrik’s a great hockey guy, but we felt it was time to make a change and give somebody else the opportunity to sit in that chair.
“Quite frankly, I had a lot of sleepless nights, and I thought a lot about this in many different ways. It wasn’t easy, and it took me a long time to get to this point.”
As for the working dynamics Rutherford envisions with his next GM, he said: “I’m available for somebody, to anybody, in the organization to ask me questions, ask me for help. But I want the new GM to make all hockey decisions. Now, he may not make decisions about the practice rink because nobody wants to make that decision… or where training camp is or some of the things that a president would do. But as for hockey… he will make those decisions.”
Candid and unvarnished as always, Rutherford dropped a bunch of news grenades during his press conference.
• On $92.8-million centre Elias Pettersson, who just had his second straight 15-goal season: “It’s the same as anything people do in life; preparation is the key to success. And I don’t believe he’s put enough preparation in at this point to be the player he needs to be. But he’s young enough, he’s capable of doing it, and if he does the things he’s told to do, he has a chance to succeed here. But if he doesn’t, you know, the GM is going to have to make a decision.”
• Discussing the urgency to trade Quinn Hughes in December, which turned the organization sharply towards a rebuild, Rutherford effectively fed the former captain into a wood-chipper: “Some people think Quinn left here because the team wasn’t any good; he was leaving anyways, OK? The best example I can give you is Matthew Tkachuk. He was in Calgary. They had a good team. He wanted to go back to the U.S. and he went. And this is not going to be the last guy, Quinn Hughes, that decides he’s going to leave. And I think I’m close to him; I really like him. I respect what he did in Vancouver. He put on a good show for a lot of years. But guys work towards free agency, and we should respect the fact that he had that option.”
• Rutherford reiterated how poor the Canucks’ dressing-room culture had been, and praised the new one forming since the team came together after the March 6 trade deadline: “It was really bad. The chemistry and the culture in the Canucks dressing room over the last five weeks is the best it’s been since I’ve been here. This team has a chance to move forward, and let every player enjoy coming to the rink and not have to worry about somebody barking at them in practice or picking on them in the room or whatnot. This group is tightly knit. (There are) good veterans left here, good mentors, very good young character players, we’ve got a number of good young players coming. So this team is going in the right direction.”
Rutherford expressed gratitude to Canucks fans, who seem to have embraced the early stages of the rebuild and kept Rogers Arena full most nights despite the 25-win season.
He said there will be “no shortcuts” on the rebuild.
Someone else will have to take over the transition Allvin began, and Rutherford may not be around when it is finished.
“Despite the way things look right now… I believe this organization’s in a very good place to move forward,” Rutherford said. “I feel that I haven’t done as good a job as I would have liked to, and I would have wished we were in a stronger place by now. But look, where I’m at in my life now, I can do whatever I want and be very comfortable. And I like this franchise a lot, and I want to do what’s right for them. So if I feel comfortable that when we have a good, strong person in place and maybe even potentially two people over time, I would feel comfortable making a decision to leave.”
It is the Canucks first rebuild this century, coming 15 years after the team’s last run to a Stanley Cup Final.
Even before news of Allvin’s firing came overnight from a report in Sweden, Friday was scheduled for player exits. There were six formal press conferences involving waves of Canuck players, many thousands of words spoken.
“I think it’s really important to learn from this year,” veteran goalie Kevin Lankinen said. “We can’t just wrap this thing and move on. We have to sit down and learn — older guys, younger guys, doesn’t matter — because these are the kind of experiences that if you turn them the right way, you can bring fuel for not just next year but for your whole career. Because this is obviously something that we don’t want to go through again.
“You know, the best time to start a change was probably 15 years ago. But the next best time is right now.”
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