The Vancouver Canucks are currently the National Hockey League’s top team — and their GM has taken notice.
In an exclusive interview with Sportsnet’s Iain MacIntyre on Tuesday, Canucks general manager Patrik Allvin said that if his team keeps playing like it has through the first half of the 2023–24 season, he’ll have little choice but to reward them ahead of the deadline.
“I think I owe it to the players,” Allvin told MacIntyre. “The players dictate how good we are and how they’re buying into the way we want to play. We know that they are capable of playing at this high level.
“If they continue to do that, then it’s on me to make sure I support them and give them opportunities to be successful.”
The Canucks have qualified for the Stanley Cup Playoffs just once since 2015, and that was in the COVID-shortened 2019–20 campaign. They finished the halted regular season with the seventh-best record in the Western Conference.
After defeating the Minnesota Wild in the 2020 play-in rounds, the Canucks upset the defending champion St. Louis Blues in the first round before falling in seven to the Vegas Golden Knights.
These Canucks are having a much stronger regular season than the 2019–20 iteration of the club, but Allvin — who replaced previous GM Jim Benning during the 2021–22 season — still has areas he wants to see this year’s team improve upon.
“I don’t think we look at the record. I think we look at more the details of how we play,” Allvin said. “I want to give the coaches a lot of credit for being able to implement and work with the players, and get them to where we need to be in order to have success.
“I think we continue to find the consistency. There was a stretch there (in November) where we win one, lose one, and we don’t want to be a team like that. We want to find that consistency.”
The Canucks have already made six trades since the start of training camp in September 2023. Allvin credited Canucks president Jim Rutherford, a bit of a maverick in his own right, for giving him the guidance to make those deals.
With the trade deadline now less than two months away (March 8), it’s safe to assume the Canucks aren’t done. They’ll return to action on Thursday to take on the Arizona Coyotes at Rogers Arena in Vancouver.
