The team was bad and overpaid but many fans didn't realize it. Messier was at the core of a necessary rebuild over one of our most beloved lineups. We forgive and credit Mike Keenan now for it but we refuse to credit Messier.
We do? You won’t find many people willing to say anything good about Keenan. He lucked into a great trade with the benefit of hindsight (the Linden for Bertuzzi/McCabe/3rd deal) but just brutal return on investment for other players and his destruction of the team’s culture took a long while to build back up.
I recall we were leading in faceoffs and goals for in the league in the history of this team.
97-98:
3rd last in the NHL (11th out of 26 in GF)
98-99:
2nd last in the NHL (23rd out of 27 in GF)
99-00:
18th out of 28 in the NHL (14th out of 28 in GF)
I can’t find league face off stats in that timeframe, but we certainly were not an offensive league leader. And even if we won a lot of face offs, that did not translate to any sort of team success.
We really had too many chiefs and that mainly meant Trevor and Messier - Trevor was leaking the shenanigans to the media such as Messier's involvement with management decisions and Keenan screaming at him in the locker room.
You have a source for this claim, I presume? Because there are two sources refuting it. Tony Gallagher said multiple Canuck players who refused to be named but were
not Linden leaked the story, and Gino Odjick has gone on record talking about it multiple times.
A vaunted leader such as Messier should have easily been able to steer the ship, no? The best leader in professional hockey? The guy who played on teams of all stars and hall of famers for his whole career? I must have missed when the Rangers needed to ship out Bryan Leetch and Mike Richter to make room for “one leader”. This whole argument that Messier couldn’t lead the room unless Trevor Linden was gone never has and never will hold water.
Jeff Brown and Kirk MacLean's careers were pretty much over and the giveing of guys like Cliff Ronning and Momesso by Quinn weren't something we could recover from.
These are fair points. Letting Ronning walk was the first domino to fall in how we ended up with Messier in the first place, as the Canucks were hoping to secure Gretzky and had to fall back on Messier when that plan blew up in their faces. I love Quinn, but he wasn’t without his missteps.
Failing to maximize any sort of return for McLean or Brown (or others) exacerbated our issues, though.
We also had a very disgruntled Pavel Bure who couldn't play on the same line as Mogilny - it was either one or the other, and they both needed to be on the top line to produce.
Also a fair point - but then, that should have contributed to a more balanced offensive attack...if everything else hadn’t gone to hell.
Bure played marvelous with Messier as he taught the team to go East/West on two-on-ones, especially in the neutral zone. This meant the lone D couldn't choose a rusher without the other one getting a breakaway with no chance to recover. He also taught this to Naslund when Bure sat out (Pavel probably had his recurring knee injury that needed healing which wasn't ever talked about while he sat).
Good Lord. Bure was miraculous with anyone who played with him - but where in the world do you get the idea he taught Naslund anything? Naslund certainly gives credit to Messier for teaching him a lot about being a professional, but he has never once mentioned any sort of mentoring from Bure. And stylistically speaking, Naslund and Bure’s offensive games could not be more different.
Messier also taught the defense that Officials almost never call a 3rd penalty on 5 on 3 situations and Adrian Aucoin took this to heart. Aucoin pounded the crap out of those power play units. At one point, we were running 90% on the PK at 5 on 3, better than our 5 on 4's.
I feel like a broken record - your source for this is...what? Messier was utterly abysmal defensively here. One could reasonably argue at least he was among the offensive leaders on the team. But fans, players and media types alike agree he was lacking in defensive effort or prowess.
Contrary to what we would like to believe, things aren’t black and white. While Keenan and Messier are the two biggest villains in Canucks history, but they have their fans. Naslund gives a lot of credit to Messier as I mentioned above, and Bertuzzi is fond of Keenan as a coach (while he reviles the more beloved Marc Crawford).
Things began to turn around for the Canucks in the 1999-2000 season when Brian Burke, a competent GM, was brought in to steer the ship. Firing Keenan and restoring a culture of team accountability and community responsibility are what started the rise out of the basement. While one of the vital players in that group attributes some of the success to Messier, the real architect of the Canucks’ 2000s resurgence was Burke.