It’s about time the Vancouver Canucks were hateable again

Over the past days, weeks, and months, the Vancouver Canucks have added quite a bit to their NHL roster. And we don’t just mean the players themselves, but those players’ qualities and attributes, too.

Penalty killing. Defensive acumen. Speed. Physicality.

There’s a lot that the Canucks have now that they didn’t have before. Including one trait that won’t show up in a stat column, or a post-game recap, or most scouting reports. A truly intangible characteristic that might not even technically be a word in the English language:

Hateability.

It’s about time that the Canucks were hateable again. And thanks to a handful of those recent-ish additions, they are.

But before we look at the current roster’s ability to make the blood of their opponents boil, let’s take a look at the past. Because being “hateable” is usual not considered a positive thing, but it has traditionally been a big component of the best moments in franchise history.

The 2011 Era is the high-water mark in Canucks hockey for many fans, and that team was absolutely loaded up with agitators, troublemakers, and straight-up pricks.

There was Ryan Kesler. Alex Burrows. Maxim Lapierre. Tanner Glass. Raffi Torres. Keith Ballard. Even Kevin Bieksa used to be despised by plenty of the same folks around the league that now cheer him on as a SportsNet analyst.

This abhorredness wasn’t just a sideshow, coincidence, or indirect result of playstyle, either, and it certainly wasn’t a detriment. It was at the center of Canucks hockey at the time, and it made the team incredibly difficult to play against on a nightly basis. On many occasions, opposing teams wanted to beat the Canucks up more than they wanted to beat them, and it showed on the scoreboard.

Speaking of which, long-term Vancouverite fans know the score. The rest of Canada, and even many American fans, are going to hate on the Canucks, anyway. For whatever reason, this is just a franchise that sticks under the saddle of other organizations like a burr (pun intended.) So, if the Canucks are going to be hated leaguewide no matter what they do, why not lean into it a little bit. It worked in 2011, and it can work again.

The list of celebrated shift disturbers goes back far longer than twelve years ago, too. Names like Jarkko Ruutu, Matt Cooke, Antoine Roussel, Esa Tikkanen, Dave “Tiger” Williams, Hilliard Graves. Heck, even Gino Odjick was as much an agitator as he was an enforcer, he was just of the rare variety that can both start stuff and finish it.

The list is a long one, but one that stops short a few years ago. For a while there, other teams really didn’t seem to hate the Canucks in the same way they had before. Several consecutive Canucks rosters chock-full of personality-less JAGs (just a guy) didn’t raise up much ill will at all, and, if anything, opponents mostly seemed to pity the Canucks.

Nobody wants to be pitied, and especially not in the sport of hockey. Being hated is much more desirable.

And now, thanks to a good chunk of the recent additions, the Canucks are well on their way to being hateable again.

That starts with Sam Lafferty, who arrived in town for the low price of a fifth rounder and a reputation for getting under the skin of the opposition. So far, that reputation seems to be an apt one, as not a game has gone by on the young 2023/24 season in which Lafferty hasn’t been at the center of a major scrum.

That includes this memorable moment in the Philadelphia game in which Lafferty deked the puck into the net post-whistle, and then got to hear all about how little the Flyers enjoyed that: