PENTICTON, BC — There’s a different mindset surrounding this Vancouver Canucks team than in seasons past. Gone are the days of a team dreaming about crashing the postseason party. This year — and the next handful beyond it — is about building for the future.

Even with the expectations of bounce-back seasons for their top players, the Canucks are bound to finish low in the NHL standings once again. But there’s a good way to get there, and there’s certainly a bad way. If teams go in with a bad mentality and simply go through the motions of hockey without learning, that’s how a franchise becomes the NHL equivalent of a truck spinning its tires in mud. But if players learn to take the right lessons from losing, it sets them up well for the peaks and valleys of an NHL career.

In his season-opening press conference on Wednesday, new Canucks head coach Manny Malhotra said he expects his players not to play “losing hockey”. On Thursday, he expanded on that belief.

“It goes without saying mistakes are going to be made on the ice, but it’s the frequency of those mistakes and how often you see those mistakes,” Malhotra told reporters Thursday. “Mistakes are going to be made. We’re good with that. But as long as we’re learning from them and we don’t see them often and repetitively in our game, that’s one thing. The structure of the game, making sure you’re in the place you need to be when you need to be there, plays a large part of it.”

Malhotra has seen firsthand what the best teams do to win, and believes instilling that culture starts now. “You look at the best teams in the league, they’re quite often the most structured and adhere to their structure the most. And then it comes down to the intangibles, the intensity at which you play your system, the tenacity on pucks, the ability to win puck battles, win races. When all those things come together, and you become a team that’s hard to play against, for me, that’s winning hockey.”

On Thursday, Malhotra was putting his words into action. The pace of the opening two practices was fast; the players were pushed to their limits, and Malhotra didn’t hesitate to make his thoughts known. He even took part in the bag skate with his players, showing the work ethic he expects from them.

Jake DeBrusk thinks his coach hit the nail on the head about ‘losing hockey’.

“I think that there’s two ways to lose,” DeBrusk said. “I think when you buy in, you’re playing your system, and you’re doing it, and sometimes the puck doesn’t go your way or just bounces or something, but you played the game plan, you did everything that was asked, and you gave it your all.”

“You can look yourself in the mirror and say you at least did that, whereas the other side is obviously if you’re not doing any of those things and you lose, then that’s losing hockey. So I think it’s more just a buy-in in terms of the day-to-day and the preparation of what our game plan is.”

Zeev Buium put it a little more plainly. “You’re never going to accept losing,” Buium said. “If you go out losing because you weren’t working hard and you were just taking the night off, it’s not acceptable. But you know, some nights you just get beat… so I think if that’s our approach every night to play to win and play our hearts out, and sometimes we’re not going to get your results, but that’ll just give us the best chance to hang our hat on something when we go home.”

Returning veteran Luke Schenn interpreted it more as an “attitude”.

“Obviously, not everything’s going to go your way each and every night, and I think there’s maybe an understanding of maybe where the team is and where they want to get to, but that doesn’t mean you go out there and you know you’re lazy and not competing and have bad habits,” Schenn said. “At the end of the day, we’re all NHL players here. We’re all pros, and we’re trying to turn things around here, and it’s on us to do that. And you know, in our minds, we’re optimistic, and we want to work and achieve more than maybe the expectation is.”

The Canucks know the stats and metrics aren’t in their favour. That understanding gives them an extra sense of preparedness; they’ll be ready to extract every ounce of value from their losses.