Thirty-one teams have won 12 or more games in a row at home in the history of the National Hockey League.
The 2008-09 Vancouver Canucks won 11 straight. And it took a loss in a shootout for them not to be the 32nd team to win a dozen in a row in the friendly confines.
Over the course of that season, Ryan Kesler tallied 59 points.
About one-third of those, 19 points in all, came in that 11-game home stretch that began with a 4-3 victory over the Carolina Hurricanes on Feb. 3, 2009. The 11th win, a 3-0 shutout, came March 19 vs. St. Louis.
In between were wins over Chicago, Montreal, Tampa Bay, Columbus, Minnesota, San Jose, Los Angeles, Colorado and Dallas. Interspersed were a few losses — the Canucks went 5-4 on the road in that period — but at home they were perfect.
It was the beginning of what would prove to be the peak of Kesler’s career. After the season, he earned his first Selke Trophy nomination as the league’s top defensive forward.
A year prior, Kesler had been viewed as a capable, but hardly game-changing, third-line centre.
Chalk this remarkable step forward to a couple of fateful choices by the powers that be: first, that general manager Mike Gillis chose to ignore the Kesler doubters, of whom there were many, and second, that Kesler was put on a line with veteran stars Pavol Demitra and Mats Sundin.
After having been the team’s third-line centre for the most part since first breaking into the NHL in 2003-04, Kesler was moved to the wing as head coach Alain Vigneault looked for a second scoring line behind the Sedin twins. In January 2009, Kesler was put on what became known as the RPM Line with left-winger Demitra and centre Sundin.
And with that, begat the Kesler that lives on in the memories of so many Canucks fan. A cantankerous, two-way player, a guy who could take over games with his skill and desire.
“I had heard lots of things about Ryan before accepting the job,” Gillis recalled Tuesday. “I had one long-time player tell me Ryan Kesler couldn’t make a play with a pencil.
“But being somewhat of a contrarian, I tend to not listen to that and make up my own mind and I came to see Ryan was a person ready to do whatever it takes to make the team successful.”
Hired in the spring of 2008, Gillis was handed a mandate by new owner Francesco Aquilini to win the Stanley Cup. If that meant changing the culture of the organization as a whole as well as the culture within the team itself, so be it.
Kesler, Gillis came to realize, could be a key leader in support of the obviously burgeoning stars that were the Sedins.
“He had a lot more to give than what people thought,” Gillis said. “We decided to give him a bigger leadership role.
“There’s lots of people that when they’re growing and maturing are misunderstood, and that stays with them for a long time. … All of us felt that Ryan was prepared to take advantage of those opportunities in front of him.”
The additions of Sundin and Demitra remain controversial. Demitra because he was swapped in for Markus Naslund, the team’s former captain. Sundin because he only arrived mid-season on a huge salary.
But in Gillis’s estimation, they did as much as anyone to guide Kesler towards the player he became.
“Ryan was a centre-ice man. He was put on right wing with two veteran players and he reacted the way we hoped he would react,” he said. “His game went to a new level, he started to see the ice and view the game as more than north-south. Those two players added subtlety to his game. They were constantly telling him places to go. And they fed off his speed and his tenacity.”
In Gillis’s mind, the Kesler success story was yet another lesson in how our perceptions are often wrong. The hive mind struggles to deal with people, ideas or items that don’t quite fit into the pre-conceived boxes we carry around in our heads.
What Kesler achieved 11 years ago this month shattered what had been thought of him before.
“It’s easy to misunderstand people who are driven, who are outliers, who are unsatisfied with complacency,” Gillis said. “They can get labelled as troublesome.”
As the Canucks celebrate their 50th season, we’re looking back at the moments that stand out as the biggest in franchise history on and off the ice, the good and a few bad. We’re highlighting the top moments from the 1970s through November 2019, the ’80s in December 2019, the ’90s in January, the ’00s in February 2020 and the ’10s in March 2020.
If you have any great memories of where you were when your favourite moments happened, or what they meant to you, send them to [email protected]
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