Did Mike Keenan Destory what Could've been a superteam? Or was the situation doomed no matter what?

[Askel]

Yup.

It’s a long time ago now but there was a ton of discussion about this on Dan Russell’s show at the time and IIRC the actual chain of events was something like this :

1) Vancouver and Gretzky/Barnett were negotiating late into the night and Vancouver made an offer. Gretzky tells them he wants to sleep on it.

2) the Canucks get tipped off that unbeknownst to them, Gretzky had also been negotiating with NYR and had a meeting booked for the next morning. Vancouver realizes they’re getting played and their offer is just going to be used for leverage and he really had no intention of signing here (or at best, are the backup plan).

3) George McPhee, who is a bit of a hothead, phones the Gretzky camp and confronts them with the NYR news and challenges them to sign the contract or complete the negotiation right then and there if they’re actually serious. Or get stuffed if they’re just using the Canucks.

4) Gretzky predictably refuses and then has a tailor-made excuse for why he didn’t sign with a team he was never going to sign for anyway. And we end up being the ones looking bad when they were negotiating in bad faith.

Again, there was just no way ever that Gretzky was going to choose to come to a small Canadian team over taking his actress wife to Broadway and reuniting with Messier. In hindsight it’s almost comical to think he actually wanted to come here.

Hadnt heard that before. Makes sense

 

[Oleksiak]

The combination of Keenan's lack of professionalism and naming a lazy locker room cancer as captain destroyed any hope of being competitive. Even Keenan's one good trade was made out of spite instead of attempting to improve the team.

It's hard to tell if Messier would have cut some of his garbage out if he'd had a coach who sent him to the pressbox where he belonged when he floated around the ice, or suspended him for his terrible attitude.

 

[lawrence]

Yes well I happen to be Cloutier's biggest defender on here and you're bias against him lead you to remembered and state things that were either flat out wrong or attributed to Potvin. These things really make me rage!!!

My opinion on Cloutier has always been the same. I switched from a bandwagon fan to an avid fan mid-season before we signed Messier, so I had no Kirk McLean nostalgia but rather had to live through a number of long years while the Canucks were plagued with a carousel of bad goaltending (Irbe aside). Cloutier wasn't great but he wasn't bad and he was the first guy to come in and stabilize the position, so I appreciate him for that. To me he was basically just a Jacob Markstrom.

I think there's a couple of factors that go into public opinion on him. First with the Canucks being good again brought a lot of new fans onto the bandwagon with expectations of success who didn't remember the bad goaltending years and this was the pre-cap era so all the top teams had elite goaltending: Hasek, Roy, Brodeur, Belfour, Joseph, and the like. The fans were demanding a Luongo but all they got was a Markstrom... and ironically note how when we moved into this category with Luongo public opinion had shifted to top tier goaltending didn't really matter and you don't want to spend to much cap on a goalie

Next he had the misfortune of a once in a career flub coming at the worst time right at the start of his career as a starter and making it all anyone could remember. Don't need to go into too much detail on that.

Finally, he really never had much opportunity to reverse opinion. He really only had a 4 year window and two of those playoffs were as the 8th seeds against dynasty teams Detroit and Colorado. He was getting better every year but in playoffs #4 against Calgary he was playing great then suffered a fluke injury stepping on a bad spot of ice and leaving the game for Auld who wasn't nearly as good and probably costing us the series. He was only 27 at this point and it was followed by the lockout year, should have been going into his goaltending prime but instead the injuries had piled up and he was no longer the same after that season. He'd stick around a couple more years but just couldn't play through the injuries.

This is pretty much the history thread so I'm going to have my Cloutier rant here

Let’s just leave it as that then. I wasn’t the only Canuck fan that disliked cloutier and thought he was overrated. Some people
Hated the Gelinas for Sanderson swap some people liked it.

 

[Zippgunn]

It's a footnote when it all comes down to it, but I always liked Geoff Sanderson from his Hartford days and was annoyed when Keenan quickly re-swapped him for toughness in Brad May. The Burke-Snow shuffle was also weird, although Snow carved out a brief, OK career with Vancouver all things considered.

I was also baffled at why they just released Irbe, after he put up a winning record with respectable stats on a really sad-sack team.

Irbe was easily the player of the year for the Canucks after they acquired him but that honor went to, surprize!, Brian Noonan, Keenan's main stooge, who, after his fabulous performance here, went on to play exactly 8 more games in the NHL. I compare the moist nostalgia for the Keenan era here to the white hot hatred of Willie D. on this board and just shake my head...

 

[MS]

Irbe was easily the player of the year for the Canucks after they acquired him but that honor went to, surprize!, Brian Noonan, Keenan's main stooge, who, after his fabulous performance here, went on to play exactly 8 more games in the NHL. I compare the moist nostalgia for the Keenan era here to the white hot hatred of Willie D. on this board and just shake my head...

Noonan won the unsung hero award but yeah, it was terrible.

 

[Canucks1096]

Irbe was easily the player of the year for the Canucks after they acquired him but that honor went to, surprize!, Brian Noonan, Keenan's main stooge, who, after his fabulous performance here, went on to play exactly 8 more games in the NHL. I compare the moist nostalgia for the Keenan era here to the white hot hatred of Willie D. on this board and just shake my head...

Bure said Hi

 

[I am toxic]

Yep, when thinking of bad coaches over the last 3 decades*, Keenan and Willie D immediately spring to mind.

And when I say bad, it cannot be overstated how much it is an understatement.

*you missed out by a decade, Laforge