In a season that’s been up and down for the Vancouver Canucks with a lot of lows, changes have now happened, a day after a 4-1 loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins. It was reported by Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman that Vancouver relieved head coach Travis Green of his duties and replaced him with Bruce Boudreau. However, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to people as the Canucks came close to letting him go in mid to late November as well with the rumors of Claude Julien and Scott Walker.
Then about two hours later this was reported by Gaffar. The Canucks organization has yet to officially announce anything, so things are clearly still ongoing. It should be noted that earlier this week Benning told others in the hockey world that he didn’t believe Travis Green would be fired. Yet, tonight this unravels likely meaning it was an ownership decision.
Then it was reported by Rick Dhaliwal that while Chris Gear was a likely choice for interim GM, Stan Smyl was the favorite. Thomas Drance, who covers the Canucks for The Athletic tweeted out that Daniel and Henrik Sedin would likely have more involvement in day-to-day operations as well.
Unfortunately, it’s been a rough go the last eight years for the rabid and loyal fan base in Vancouver, BC with not much success under General Manager Jim Benning. Fans have been calling for his firing for a while among other acts of displeasure. But appears, their acts last night during the game against Pittsburgh pushed management to the point of changes.
But the chants weren’t the only thing last night that fans did to show their displeasure. In a topic that was hotly debated by social media and even Vancouver media personnel, a fan hurled a Bo Horvat jersey on the ice. It should be noted that Horvat currently serves as the Canucks captain this season. The jersey was shortly picked up by Pittsburgh’s Brian Dumoulin, who gave it to a fan who was still willing to wear Canucks colors.
And then we had this in the Rogers Arena concourse, and not for the first time this season either.
Vancouver is one of the biggest hockey markets in North America and their fan base doesn’t exactly take losing seasons too well to say the least. With eight years of less than stellar records, it seems that it all finally came to a head for the organization. While some of these moves are likely interim, it’ll be interesting to see what happens in the days and months following this.
As of 10:30pm pacific time, the Canucks made the moves official.
Northwest Sports Desk 