Swapping out captains as the Toronto Maple Leafs did on Wednesday morning comes with inherent risks. The Vancouver Canucks know this all too well. Twice in the history of the Canucks, the hockey club has undergone a high-profile transfer of its captaincy from one teammate to another. One instance worked well. The other led to one of the most disastrous and dysfunctional periods in franchise history.
The Leafs have to hope that stripping John Tavares of the C and stitching it on Auston Matthews pans out far more like Henrik Sedin taking charge in Vancouver rather than Mark Messier.
When the Canucks elected to end Roberto Luongo’s two-year run as captain in October 2010, the team made the right call to put Henrik Sedin in charge. The original decision to have Luongo wear the C was certainly unique and spoke to the respect the netminder had in the locker room and the role he played in the leadership group of the team at the time. But after two seasons as captain, the Canucks recognized it was time to go a more conventional route and named Henrik Sedin as Luongo’s replacement. It was a seamless transition of power as Henrik had been wearing an A in the 2009-10 season and was coming off a career-best 112-point season, which earned him both the Hart and Art Ross Trophies.
Luongo remained a central figure on the team and a powerful voice in the room but no longer carried the additional duties bestowed upon National Hockey League captains. He was free to focus on the task at hand, and that was continuing to develop into one of the pre-eminent goalies of his era.
“I want to put my whole focus on goaltending,” Luongo said at the time of relinquishing the captaincy. “I wouldn’t say it was a distraction. I think I could put something less on my plate. The less distractions as a goaltender (the better). At the end of the day, winning a championship for this team (is more important) than being captain. It’s a weird position. You are on your own. You have to be focused all the time and thinking about your job. Sometimes when you are away from the rink, getting ready to play games, there was other stuff getting involved.”
The switch from Roberto Luongo to Henrik Sedin allowed both players — and the team to flourish. In Henrik’s first year as captain, he guided the Canucks to the President’s Trophy and to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals. A captain who let his actions speak loudly and one who led by example, Henrik was a calm and steady guiding force for the hockey club — and remained in the captain’s role until he and his brother Daniel retired at the end of the 2017-18 season.
The airtight transition from Luongo to Henrik — who remained teammates and friends for years and ultimately were reunited again in the 2022 Hockey Hall of Fame class — stands in stark contrast to the way the captaincy was stripped from Trevor Linden and handed to Mark Messier a decade earlier.
Signed to a three-year, 18 million dollar contract in July of 1997, Messier was brought to Vancouver to do what he did best — win championships. With Mike Keenan in charge, Messier was given carte blanche to lead the way he felt was best. That included taking the captaincy from Trevor Linden.
Messier’s time in Vancouver was a disaster. Three years. Limited production. Diminishing returns. And ultimately, no playoffs. And on top of all that, the most effective power play he ran was the one that saw him take the C from the popular Linden, who’d held the post for five seasons and had led the Canucks to Game 7 of the 1994 Stanley Cup Final — against Messier and Keenan.
It’s a period of franchise history that still makes the blood of long-time Canucks fans boil.
With the benefit of time, hindsight and some much-needed self-reflection, Messier told NBC Sports in 2021 that if he had a second chance at his time in Vancouver, taking the C from Linden is something he wouldn’t have done.
“When I went to Vancouver the expectation was to win a Stanley Cup and the reality was the team had changed a lot since their Stanley Cup run in 1994. I think there was only two or three players left from that team. I tried to bridge the divide between players on the team, but if I had to do it again I would have not have accepted the captaincy and tried to do it in a different way. I think that’s probably the thing I’d change the most.”
Many Canucks fans wish Messier had access to a time machine. Maybe he’d go back to 1997 and not have signed in Vancouver in the first place. But at the very least, he could have eased into his time on the West Coast rather than making waves the way he did.
So the Canucks have clearly seen both ends of the captaincy transition spectrum. It’ll be interesting to see if there is any fallout in Toronto with the Leafs making Auston Matthews the main man while John Tavares falls back into a secondary role.
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