Canucks: How Jim Rutherford convinced ownership to rebuild

“You need an army. That should be the slogan for the Canucks. We need an army! Let’s go,” Jason Botchford once declared. “We need picks. We need prospects. We need players. We need an army.”

I certainly don’t think Jim Rutherford ever heard Botch’s exhortation that the Vancouver Canucks accept that if they really focused on sacrificing the here and now, a couple years of pain of not making the playoffs was a necessary thing in order to line up long-term success. That if you really dialed in, a rebuild need not be a long-term thing. That you could right the ship in just a couple seasons.

Whether Rutherford is aware or not of Botchford’s call for an army of guys, it’s very clear that he is now singing from the same song sheet.

Somehow, Rutherford’s Canucks are rebuilding. Last week they traded Quinn Hughes, the best defenceman in team history, and managed to recoup one of the best hauls in team history. You lose the trade when you give up the best player, even when you do get a trio of younger players who all fill needs that your team had before the trade.

There was a time, well two times really, when the Vancouver Canucks’ top hockey man was so roundly rejected by ownership over the idea of going young, of eschewing the playoffs, to reset the roster for the long haul, that the top man was swiftly shown the door.

If you’ve read these pages long enough, and most of you have, you know what happened to both Mike Gillis and Trevor Linden. To recap, for those who don’t know: Gillis, in 2014, and Linden, in 2018, essentially told Canucks chairman Francesco Aquilini that what the team needed to do was give up on the idea of playoff games for a couple seasons, focus fully on grabbing a boat load of talented young players, and do everything you could to assemble an army of guys who would pay out in a year or two or three.

And yet, here we are. Rutherford openly talking about how the team needs to find a bunch of young guys. That Hughes trade is just a start. They’re not going to blow the whole thing up, but they’re not going to be afraid to move out veterans and bring in youth.

In conversation with a handful of reporters on Friday, Rutherford even said the word rebuild. That’s where they’re at, and really they’ve been there for a while he admitted.

That caught me in my tracks. A few weeks ago he admitted to me the focus was about getting younger — the word didn’t matter. And honestly, I’ve agreed the language in the big picture doesn’t matter. That what they need to do is in line with Botch’s army of guys. They need lots of young talent to drive them to the future.

But to use that word is something that’s long been understood to be taboo around ownership. Not so anymore, it seems.

The owner is onboard, Rutherford told me Monday evening.

“He understands where we’re at and of the circumstances,” Rutherford said. “The conversations I’ve had, he understands.”

Hughes was going to go, Rutherford has admitted to everyone. Hughes likely wanting to go had been the talk behind the scenes for some time and certainly the assumption I’d been operating under for a while now, even if no one was saying it on record.

But how did the veteran hockey boss convince the man who pays the bills that focusing on adding young players and draft picks is the way forward? The simple reality of the modern NHL, Rutherford told me.

“When we look at where our league is compared to 10 years ago, when it comes to free agency the players just aren’t there,” he argued. Last summer, one could argue, taught a lesson in that reality. Trades still happen, but the reality is to build out your roster, you need to juice your efforts in the draft.

The Hughes trade played out even better than he hoped, he claimed.

“I was stressed we wouldn’t get a return we were after,” he said. “We would be painted into a corner. We do now need some success in this draft. If we were to do that we’ll avoid a four or five year rebuild.”

They’ve added a trio of young players in Marco Rossi, Zeev Buium and Liam Ohgren who fill out holes in the lineup. Rossi is the second line centre they’ve wanted all along. Buium isn’t a straight replacement for Hughes, but he’s just turned 20 and is already looking destined to be a top-pairing defenceman. With respect to Tom Willander, the Canucks just didn’t have a prospect like Buium.

Of course, they had Hughes. Now they don’t. But they could quickly find themselves with an army of guys. There are veterans who are still going to stay, that’s clear too. But the overall project is skewing young. Those players will have to lead the way as much as the veterans like Elias Pettersson and Conor Garland will have to.

“There’s great character here in these new players. To make this work, we need lots of character. It has to be a new group.”

pjohnston@postmedia.com