The further the Vancouver Canucks get from their 50 wins and 109 points of a year ago, it’s becoming abundantly clear that last season was a mirage. An outlier. A brief distraction, essentially, after a dismal and dark decade.

And so really this season now feels like a continuation of what the Canucks put on the ice from 2014 through 2023. For a fleeting few months, last year was fun. Cue the confetti cannons.

The problem with confetti cannons is that they leave behind a mess. If you win the Stanley Cup, you don’t mind spending the off-season cleaning up your surroundings. The Canucks, however, did not win the Cup – and didn’t come close. They posted six playoff wins over 13 games and missed an opportunity twice to close out the Edmonton Oilers in the second round last spring.

Again, in the moment, it was fun and relative to what Canucks fans had been served in the preceding 12 years, it felt like so much more than it actually was.

And now this. An aimless franchise that finds itself wandering again, feeling as far from true contender status as it has at any point over the past decade. A team that, with its current coaching staff, is among the bottom feeders in the league in offence, shot generation, scoring chances, and expected goals since December 1st is not a threat to go on any kind of Cinderella playoff run. It’s a team that’s likely to get swallowed whole and spat out in a hurry by Winnipeg or Vegas in the opening round.

A once-promising core never lived up to expectations. And while the team has begun the process of stripping away pieces, it’s become clear that the remnants of that core aren’t the right guys to get the Canucks where they need to go.

Brock Boeser has been playing like he’s waiting for a trade. Thatcher Demko just can’t stay healthy enough to rely on anymore. Quinn Hughes is the undisputed leader of this group, but it’s now fair to wonder if there is enough time remaining on his contract to demonstrate to him a direction that will make him stay. And, of course, there is Elias Pettersson. Nothing to see, nothing left to say on that file.

Moving off JT Miller last month was a start. But that’s all it was. It’s time to strip this thing down and try again. Some of that has to start before next week’s trade deadline. Other moves may take a while longer. But it should be clear to ownership and management that the group they’ve assembled is, at best, a middle-of-the-road hockey club. And that’s simply not good enough.

Filip Chytil, Drew O’Connor and Marcus Pettersson can all play. But on their own, they are all merely complementary pieces. Every team needs a solid supporting cast, but this is a discussion about the stars of the show – the leading men. And outside of Hughes, there aren’t any here. And even with Hughes having another standout season, it has meant absolutely nothing in the big picture.

So, three plus years under this new management regime, it’s hard to see a vision. It’s hard to discern a direction. The team is dull. And quite frankly, on a lot of nights since the start of the new year, it’s been downright difficult to sit through entire games. It’s hockey. It’s big business. But it’s also supposed to be entertainment.

People are being asked to shell out huge sums of money to watch and support this product – and that asking price is only going higher.

Someone in charge has to recognize that this organization is backsliding to a place this market has been for far too long – broken down at the side of the highway while so many other teams are in the passing lane.

The group the Canucks have assembled isn’t good enough. And with 23 games to go, clinging desperately to the second wild card spot feels like it will be a challenge simply too great for this offensively inept operation. And how low a bar is that?

Change came in late January, and it’s clear that so much more is needed. Who knows what new faces can be attained and injected into this lineup? And at what cost?

But it’s so abundantly obvious now that the pieces this team thought it could build around aren’t the right ones for the job.