Injury proves Virtanen should be sent back to junior #mycolumn

Many of you watched Jake Virtanen score a goal with his face the other day and thought “Wow, what a warrior. That’s the type of guy that I want on my NHL team.”. For a moment, I agreed with you; that was the toughest thing I’ve ever seen. But then, he went down and stayed down.

That was his death wish. He can’t stay with the Canucks.

Since the Canucks drafted Virtanen, they’ve been selling us on the same few qualities. “He’s tough as nails”. “He’s got elite skating ability”. “He’ll murder you in your sleep”.

We didn’t see that on this play. Let’s work backwards. 

First off, between himself, Bo Horvat, and Sven Baertschi, there wasn’t a single Canucks fan alive that was going to bed until that game was done. So he wasn’t going to murder any of us. Strike one. 

Secondly, if he has such elite skating ability, why wasn’t he able to get out of the way? If you actually watched the games, you’d notice that he moves maybe three and a half feet from the time Yannick Weber begins to wind up for the one-timer to the moment of impact, a solid two seconds later. Surely, if he was as advertised, he could have dodged that proverbial bullet. 

Lastly, he’s clearly not that tough yet if he’s going to put himself in situations like this. We’ve spent the preseason talking about rookies who refuse to act like they’ve been there before, and do dumb things like celebrate their unimportant goals. But what about Virtanen here?

If he was as grizzled as a vet, we wouldn’t have known he was hurt. He would have skated away and got stitched up by a trainer only because they league mandates it. He’d probably require the backup trainer to do it after punching out the first one.

I’m exaggerating, obviously. If he was a real vet, he wouldn’t have bled. It would have bounced off him, and that would have been that.

To make matters worse, he came back from his injury. That’s the worst thing you can do. Players who come back from injury and go on to continue to put points on the board tend to plateau at that very moment. Paul Kariya’s  “off the floor, on the board” moment was one of the coolest blatant disregardings of a concussion in human history, but he was never the same afterwards. Steven Stamkos had his best year after taking a puck to the face himself, but he let it (the arrogance or the shockwave, take your pick) get to his head and how he’s a 40 goal guy waiting for the Leafs to give him fifteen billion dollars. Speaking of the Leafs, nobody knows what Bobby Baun ever did other than score a goal on a broken leg, and Mikhail Grabovski has been a floating, overrated trash heap since this goal. 

For the most part, this is because these players get exposed as mentally weak. They think that they’re displaying an overcoming of adversity by returning to the ice after injury, but really, they’re just showing an incapability to stay on immediately after crunch time. They’re like the person in a relationship who storms off during an argument, only to come back later. They’ll claim that coming back to the significant other was the important part, but hours before, they proved to be a quitter.

Look no further in hockey than Jacques Plante. We all know the story of his goalie mask, how he put it on so he could return to the game after breaking his nose. Few know that his coach, Toe Blake, was livid when he came out wearing it, recognizing that he was about to create a culture of mentally weak goalies. He was right; Plante kept wearing it, other goalies did the same, Glenn Hall’s consecutive games streak ended shortly after, and goalies have been drama royalty ever since.

I’m not saying that Virtanen was necessarily just trying to create drama when he went down, but by keeping him up with the team, you encourage acts like this, from himself and other rookies. That’s a very slippery slope.

When the camera panned to Virtanen, you could see his blood dripping onto the ice. That alone was a bad sign, but when you zoomed in, it showed it’s true colours. Not the green and blue of the Vancouver Canucks, but red.

Red not just like a mere mortal, but red like the Calgary Hitmen. The choice is obvious. Much like Brendan Gaunce was sent down despite his nose damage, Jake Virtanen must suffer the same fate, no matter what his skillset looks like. Maybe he’ll be tough enough for the show next year, but for now, he has work to do.