Vancouver Canucks' Yannick Weber, left, of Switzerland, and Henrik Sedin, of Sweden, celebrate Sedin's goal against the Minnesota Wild during the second period of an NHL hockey game in Vancouver, B.C., on Monday February 16, 2015.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
Everything is going to plan.
This season's goal for the Vancouver Canucks was modest: make the playoffs and begin to build the foundations of a team that can contend in several years, developing young players on a team with a winning mentality.
The context is essential. The plan, drawn up by rookie team president Trevor Linden, came out of the wreckage of last season. The team was tarnished. The Canucks had nearly won the Stanley Cup in 2011 and kept chasing that prize, selling the future for immediate veteran help, before failing to even make the playoffs a season ago.
Grasping for the dream was abandoned. Last summer, the Canucks invested in players – the likes of goalie Ryan Miller and winger Radim Vrbata – to help keep the team competitive – and a concerted focus was placed on a new generation, starting with teenager Bo Horvat.
It's working. The Canucks are not Cup contenders, but they have a reasonable shot at making the playoffs. There's the usual chatter about the Canucks making some big trade to bolster the current lineup, but such talk doesn't make any sense given the team's longer-term focus.
The cost is too great, and the return too little. Instead, the investment of time and patience in Horvat has paid off: the 19-year-old centre has as many points in the past 10 games – eight – as star winger Daniel Sedin.
Performing relatively well this season is important – but it's not as important as what this team can become in three or four seasons, when the lineup is not led by players in their 30s, when the post-Sedins era begins.
As the Canucks were scratching out a 3-2 win over the Minnesota Wild in Vancouver on Monday night, Linden put it aptly during an intermission interview.
"We are where we thought we would be," Linden said, "and we've got a chance to get to where we want to be."
As of Tuesday morning, the Canucks are sixth in the Western Conference and second in the Pacific Division – they'd be hosting the Calgary Flames in the first playoff round if the postseason began today. Hands up anyone who predicted that matchup last fall. But with seven weeks to go, it's hard to imagine such a scenario actually playing out.
The Canucks have been so-so in 2015. They were 6-6 in January and are 5-4 so far in February. Tuesday morning, they got on a plane to begin a telling five-game road trip out east, before a busy 16 games in March. The team will be tested.
Miller, earlier this season, talked about how the better teams come together and become stronger through the winter, and how they separate themselves. The Canucks have displayed some resilience, but haven't yet faced adversity. They have been lucky with injuries this season, barely depleted before losing key players such as Alex Edler this month.
Last winter, when injuries hit, the team folded. On Monday against the Wild, the performance was impressive – though on other nights in recent weeks the team has been a ghost of itself. This is a defining stretch, but defining only as a moment in time, not in the Canucks' longer-term picture.
"Right now until mid-March, it's going to be 10, 15 big games," Daniel Sedin said before Monday's game. "We'll either get into the playoffs, or we are going to drop out of the race."
Linden talks up the playoffs and building that winning mentality, but he's frank, too. "With injuries, it's hard to chase it," he said. General manager Jim Benning, who as an assistant GM in Boston helped build the Bruins into a Cup winner, remains resolute about what the team won't give up between now and the deadline: its young prospects: "Those guys are the future of our team. We're not moving those guys."
So this is it. The Canucks have wrested themselves from their late-November-to-early-January slump, and fans have adjusted to lower expectations. Rogers Arena isn't quite sold out, and expensive seats are sometimes empty, but the crowd is much louder than it was a year ago, buoyed by fans who score cheap tickets on the secondary market. That brings people who are boisterous, who couldn't afford to go when this team was at its apex.
They take the team for what it is. The Canucks of 2014-15 are not as good as they were, but they're more fun. And when Horvat scores, as he did Monday on an impressive wrap-around attempt before banging in a rebound, there's a glimpse of of a better future.
David Ebner