The Vancouver Canucks‘ most recent loss to the New York Islanders marked their 11th straight defeat, and their head coach finally showed some frustration with his veteran players.

“Well, there are a lot of positives, and they’ve been doing a great job leading, but getting to the second period again, our veterans are the ones who feel defeated first,” Foote said. “It’s been going on here for a few years. We get off our game, we get frustrated and we over complicate it and you know, slamming the gate, things like that, it’s something we gotta get out of our culture.”

To the veteran players’ credit, they were all available following Wednesday’s morning skate to respond to the coach’s public callout on Monday night:

“I mean, it’s fair,” Brock Boeser told CanucksArmy. “Even a couple of years ago, when we were winning, guys showed emotion, and that’s alright. But yeah, right now, it’s obviously frustrating. But you gotta keep your composure right now. It’s definitely harder. But the older guys have to make sure that we’re keeping our composure and being good leaders.”

“I don’t think there’s any surprise or any issue with it on our end,” Conor Garland shared. “Obviously, we’ve lost a lot in a row here. I think Footy’s a fantastic coach, I think he’s done a good job with what we’ve had to go through this year. Early on, we were playing really well, really fast, and we’ve dealt with some things here. But as the vets, we need to be a lot better. It’s not just the play. Obviously, losing teams do have losing habits, and we can’t afford to have those in our game. That’s something we need to clean up, but we also get to play a lot better, a lot faster, a lot harder, and just find ways to win games here.”

For most of the season, Foote has made an effort to protect his veterans and leaders. He consistently expressed that they had a young team and that those young players made mistakes, but that was okay. His staff treated all of this as a coaching opportunity to help iron out the kinks in their developing players. However, the same sentiment did not resonate with some of the vets, as their frustrations spilled onto the bench.

Veterans Boeser and Tyler Myers acknowledge that it can’t happen. He and the rest of the leaders on this team need to be the support outlet for the rest of the frustrated players instead of the ones showing theirs:

“We’re obviously a young team, and you know, they said they’re rebuilding and stuff. So we can’t have that bad body language anymore,” Boeser said. “Yeah, I think that’s something our team kind of had in the past, which was fine. Like, I think there’s times you can show it, and there’s times it’s okay. But when it’s tough right now, we gotta stick up for each other, help each other, and support each other.”

“There’s conversations on the bench every game,” Myers added. “The D are obviously together on the bench, and we’ve got three 20-year-olds back there, so Marcus, Fil and I are talking to them as much as we can. We have more conversations with them. Our veteran forward group has more conversations with the forwards, but yeah, you take on a mentorship role and help those guys out as much as you can because I know I really appreciated it when I stepped into the league.”

Culture has been a big question mark surrounding this team for some time. Foote spoke about building a winning culture, and Elias Pettersson doesn’t want that on-ice frustration to impact the culture of their locker room.

“We don’t need that to creep into our team and our culture,” Pettersson shared. “I mean, all of us are frustrated with the losing streak, and it obviously sucks to lose that many games [in a row]. But at the end of the day, it’s us in here who are going to turn it around, and hopefully we can do that tonight.”

The Canucks have been in their position for some time now. They currently sit at the bottom of the NHL standings, with nine points separating them from the 31st-ranked St. Louis Blues. His team has been in this position since early December. This isn’t a new place they find themselves. CanucksArmy asked Foote what made a loss after Game 49 the right time to call out his vets?

“Just the part that they’ve been so resilient, dealt with a ton of adversity. I just don’t want it to get to where a bad bounce or a call they think should have happened. Whatever it is, or a mistake gets us off. We’ve worked so hard not to be that way, to be resilient and build a winning culture, and they’re all about it. [It was] Probably just the feel or the time or an instinct. No, I don’t want to make it a big deal. It’s what they want to be. And, we’re all on board with it.

“We still have to stay within it. One mistake can’t throw us off, that’s all.”