Canucks Player Grades: 5-0 loss vs. Toronto takes season from pathetic to diabolical

The Vancouver Canucks, as you already know, are a disaster.

But before we go on about much of what you already know, let us look back a year.

On Jan. 11, 2025, the Canucks posted an impressive 3-0 win over the Toronto Maple Leafs. Kiefer Sherwood was chanting about Elias Pettersson being a Selke Trophy candidate. Pettersson wasn’t having a very good year, and was at odds with J.T. Miller, but he was getting it done.

And, in that moment, the Canucks found themselves sitting in the second wild card spot. We look back and think of the 2024-25 season as a disaster from start to finish, but it wasn’t. It was a season where the Canucks’ engine kept stalling, for one reason or another.

This season, on the other hand, has not been a season about stalling. This season started, literally, with a Quinn Hughes turnover on the first puck touch of the first game of the season and only got worse from there.

In the eight games since Christmas, the Canucks have won one game — which came in a shootout. They’ve lost three in a row outright, and the two before that they lost in overtime and a shootout.

This team is playing dire hockey. The faces of the players show it. This isn’t fun and it isn’t going to get any better.

There are 38 games to go on this season. That’s a long run for an organization that knows it would be best off tanking. It’s grim, grim viewing.

Did it have to be like this? It was never going to be easy without Hughes. That he left is a sign of the how the organization is struggling. He knew the future would be hard.

How much of that was also because, in the end, management and ownership hired an inexperienced coach, who had a strong pedigree as a player but whose time behind the bench was not extensive and his only head coaching stint had not gone well?

Just six days ago Adam Foote was talking, somehow, about the playoffs. The team that he was an assistant coach for last year had a chance. This one doesn’t. Has he had an impact on how this team has played this year? Sure. But even with his inexperience, I figured this team was a playoff team.

This team was built to still be in the mix. Now it’s not.

What will his future be? Is he merely here to steer a sinking ship as best he can? Does he even matter?

What does matter is the players who are still available to him. And as long as you have a guy like Kiefer Sherwood, who is working his tail off night after night, you are not properly throwing in the towel as an organization.

Foote will continue to work with the players he has. He will look to win. That’s his job.

Management’s job is to dismantle what’s here. And also think about who they want around as they proceed forward.

Do they really want to have all of Brock Boeser, Elias Pettersson and Thatcher Demko on this roster next year?

Demko left the game with an injury. Another injury. He’d been playing well before Christmas but he’s been a disaster since.

Pettersson has played well enough but has become a lightning rod for the fan base.

Same for Boeser, one of the true good dudes, but his season is as stuck in reverse as his skating appears to be.

This team stinks. This team needs to truly tank. The fans need to understand the games are going to be bad for a while. But they also need to know that there’s a purpose to it all.

Tonight’s player grades, by the way? An F for everyone. There was nothing positive here.

pjohnston@postmedia.com