Jim Rutherford

It's one of the reasons why we signed the guys, the Garlands, the Bessers, the Demkos that had relationships with him, hoping for a little bit of a chance right down to the end that he would decide to stay here.

But I don't think that was ever in the cards.

And so then...

knowing what he was thinking and what he was going to do, instead of waiting until this offseason and probably getting a first-round pick from the New Jersey Devils, we accelerated where the Canucks had the leverage.

And so now there were a few teams involved, and we got the leverage to the point where we could make the best deal we could.

I'm probably not going to answer your question because I'll end up pointing fingers at people, and I don't like to do that, but it was really bad.

And since the trade deadline and since the young character energy players have come in here and stepped up, okay, to bring that energy in the room, 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.

And you say you don't know where that's going to go.

I don't know where it's going to go either.

But if that didn't get cleaned up, I can guarantee it wasn't going anywhere.

Now with that team chemistry, 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.

Good veterans left here, good mentors, very good young character players.

Got a number of good young players coming.

So this team's going in the right direction.

How long that takes, I don't know.

I would only be guessing.

Yeah, he's been disappointing, obviously.

I think there's a lot of good things he did.

You know, he tried to become a two-way player, and he's tried to do the things that it ultimately takes to win as a team, but his production is down so much, it's difficult, right?