Canucks Coffee: The losing-culture lesson of the Parayko trade block

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When we learned that Colton Parayko had blocked a trade from the St. Louis Blues to the Buffalo Sabres, I immediately thought of the lesson to be drawn out of it by every team. Don’t become a club that’s been so badly run for so long that you become a place no one wants to go to, even if it looks like you’re putting it together.

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Parayko would have made a huge difference to the Sabres. They’re a team that, after years of being incredibly messy, are now on course for not just the playoffs but to be something close to a contender.

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The Canucks, of course, would like to be this.

What they don’t want is to be what the Sabres remain: A team that players still don’t want to go to.

If you’re badly run, players will catch on. Agents will advise them that this is a place that may look nice, but is trailing the league in lots of categories.

Players need to believe you can do it, that you’re not just a fancy facade.

Past management teams in Vancouver understood this instinctively. This is an expensive place to live. The travel is tough. But it’s a beautiful place to be and the fans are fun without being over the top.

You need to lean in on everything. For a time, this was understood here. Trevor Linden knew this. Mike Gillis knew this. That has been lost.

Anyway, keep losing, keep looking aimless, players aren’t going to want to come here.

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Don’t become the Sabres.

Coach security

The Canucks are still getting badly outshot. Over the past week, as the roster has been further disassembled, it’s become almost 2 to 1.

That’s a tough way to live even if your preference is to lose in the long run for the sake of your draft hopes.

But I just don’t think we can expect a coaching change here. This is Adam Foote’s course to set till the end of the season, one way or another.

After that, all bets are off. There’s decent consensus that a more experienced coach probably squeezes a half-dozen more wins out of this roster.

Now six more wins and this team is still only 25-30-8. That vaults them over the Flames, Blackhawks and Blues. That’s still far from a playoff team.

So changing your coach would be more disruptive than anything.

Three weeks at home

And so begins an eight-game homestand. Obviously when the Canucks asked for this on the schedule, they thought they’d be in a playoff fight.

Instead, it’s now about show fans something of the future — except most of these guys won’t be in that future.

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When the Canucks closed their dreadful 1998-99 campaign on April 14, 1999, — a 5-4 loss to the Flames, who won with four seconds left on a Cory Stillman goal — there were six names in that lineup who would still be on the team three years later, the first real year of the West Coast Express era.

Markus Naslund, Ed Jovanovski, Brent Sopel, Murray Baron, Trent Klatt and Jason Strudwick. Two others were injured: Todd Bertuzzi and Mattias Ohlund.

Remarkably, that’s almost half your game roster.

Even so, that ’99 squad put up terrible results. And yet with a few tweaks a couple years later, they were a Stanley Cup contender. You need internal improvement but you also need to round out your roster.

That’s what’s in front of Canucks management. Can they pull it off? Let’s hope so.

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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