The trap that quietly destroyed the Vancouver Canucks: Sedins warned
Trevor Linden has a message for Daniel and Henrik Sedin as they take over Vancouver Canucks hockey ops, and he's not hiding the warning.
Linden spoke this morning on Sportsnet 650, and his words felt less like a congratulations and more like a survival guide for the new front office.
He loves the hire. That part is real. "You won't find two finer people," he said of the twins he played with and later managed.
-
The backdrop is brutal. Vancouver finished 25-49-8, dead last in the NHL with a -100 goal differential. The cleanup job is enormous.
Home ice was the worst of it. A 9-27-5 record at Rogers Arena. Fans paid full price to watch a team that couldn't compete in its own building.
Linden pointed at the one fault line that wrecked his own tenure as president from 2014 to 2018, the absence of alignment between hockey ops, the GM, and ownership.
He hired Jim Benning. The two reportedly clashed over the pace of the rebuild. Linden wanted patience. Benning sold ownership on a faster fix. That fight, he lost.
Patrik Allvin reference lands as a quiet shot from Linden
Linden didn't just talk about himself. He name-checked Patrik Allvin too, saying he didn't believe Allvin had that united front with ownership either. Read between the lines.
"Trust between the two of them and the general manager. That is critical. That is the most critical piece of the puzzle," Linden said. The last regime didn't have it.
Putting two retired players in charge of a 32nd-place franchise is romantic. It can also be a trap, like asking a former pilot to fix the airline after the crash.
-
The final scoreboard read 1-6 in Edmonton on April 16. That's the snapshot Daniel and Henrik inherit. Not a foundation, more like a demolition site.
Linden survived his role and walked away. The twins love this city too much to walk. That's the part nobody in Vancouver has stopped thinking about.
|
YESTERDAY
MAY 20, 2026
| ||||
| G | A | PTS | ||
| Dylan Coghlan | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Pavel Dorofeyev | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Nic Dowd | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Brett Howden | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Gabriel Landeskog | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Valeri Nichushkin | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Rasmus Andersson | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Ross Colton | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Jack Eichel | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Tomas Hertl | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Ben Hutton | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Nathan MacKinnon | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Mitch Marner | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Brandon Saad | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Colton Sissons | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Devon Toews | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Jack Ahcan | - | - | - | |
| Ivan Barbashev | - | - | - | |
| Brent Burns | - | - | - | |
| Jack Drury | - | - | - | |
| COMPLETE STATS | ||||