As we head into the 2025 portion of the 2024-25 NHL season, it’s clear the Vancouver Canucks aren’t where they want to be.

On Monday night, Canucks GM Patrik Allvin spoke candidly about a number of interesting topics in an exclusive interview with Sportsnet.

Most notably, Allvin left the door wide open when he was asked about trading Elias Pettersson — the same Elias Pettersson he signed to an eight-year extension less than a year ago. On top of his quotes about Pettersson, who the GM says needs to “mature,” Allvin also shared thoughts on Brock Boeser, JT Miller, Thatcher Demko, and Rick Tocchet.

Allvin said he needs all of his star players — minus Quinn Hughes, of course — to step up and play better. No disagreement there. He also proclaimed that getting the team to play consistently is Rick Tocchet’s job. Okay, that one is fine on the surface as well.

You hear the star players say they need to be better — not that they really deserve any sort of credit for that, of course. You hear Tocchet take the blame for his team underperforming. We’ve even heard the head coach apologize to the paying fans for the lack of wins in front of the home crowds.

What we haven’t heard to this point is the same recognition from Canucks management that their role in this — perhaps the one that has had the biggest impact thus far — is part of the reason that this hockey club that sat atop the NHL league standings around this time last year enters 2025 in the second wild card spot with the worst of their schedule still to come.

If we’re playing the blame game, Tocchet and the stars — if we can even call them that at this point — obviously deserve criticism. Allvin’s interview is a pretty clear “final warning” from management, and that’s fine. They’re well within their right to do so. The stars do need to be better, and a lot of the issues plaguing this team wouldn’t be issues if the $11.6 million centre were playing like one. But not recognizing their role in this mess is a bad look from Allvin and management, full stop.

Nobody forced the Canucks to sign Tyler Myers, a player whose only wish was to re-sign with the Canucks, for three more years. Only the Canucks were willing to give Vincent Desharnais the money and the term he got in free agency. There goes $5 million in cap space on those two. Not to mention Derek Forbort, who the club spent $1.5 million on.

Everything starts from the backend, and the Canucks’ consistent struggles to move the puck out of their own end is a direct result of the personnel that management has put back there. This failure to move the puck out greatly limits what the Canucks’ star players can do in Tocchet’s system, which we broke down recently.

Tocchet is in a tough spot because he’s trying to get the team to play with the same structure the team had last season — we’ve all seen how this management regime treats coaches who don’t, after all — without the personnel to do it.

Tocchet’s goal of getting his team to create off the rush with hopes of being more competitive in the 2025 playoffs than they were in 2024 hasn’t been a failure because of anything he’s done wrong. It comes from a miscalculation from management that the way to do that was to prioritize improving the forward corps while neglecting the backend. As of now, Tocchet’s rush offence project is virtually on pause thanks to the defence he’s going to have to deploy while Hughes is out with his injury.

Let’s be honest. The only path to victory for this lineup is to play grind-it-out low-event hockey and hope for the best. And that’s not because Tocchet got them here.

It’s the NHL’s reigning coach of the year’s job to get more consistency from this lineup? How about giving him a backend that can consistently move the puck out of their own end and doesn’t break at the slightest bit of pressure from one of the NHL’s worst teams, as we saw on Saturday?

You know how you’d get your star players to score more? Give them defencemen who can move the puck and be a threat on the rush despite not having number 43 on their jersey. More defencemen who know when and when not to pinch. Give them defencemen who don’t force the forwards to spend the entirety of their shifts defending, in turn prohibiting the Canucks from generating any sort of consistent forechecking pressure: a staple in Tocchet’s system.

What we’ve seen so far this season is largely the result of injuries, bad luck, and underperforming star players, sure.

But the Canucks’ 17-10-8 record is also the result of management constructing a blue line that, after one injury to Filip Hronek, had Noah Juulsen — a seventh defenceman in every sense of the word — slotting in to play top-four minutes.

The simple fact of the matter is that Allvin and Rutherford’s Canucks are set to deploy the worst blueline lineup we’ve seen since the Jim Benning era when they take on the Calgary Flames tonight.

And yes, injuries to Hughes and Hronek are obviously the key driver of that. Allvin and Rutherford can’t control that.

What they could control, however, was how they spent the cap space this club had in free agency. They elected to corner the market on third-pairing defencemen when all they really needed was one real top-four defenceman.

And wouldn’t you know it, the Canucks’ defence corps is going to be filled with nothing but third-pairing defencemen tonight.

That’s not on Tocchet, and it’s not on the star players.

That’s on the group that put this roster together.