Bruce Boudreau doesn’t want Vancouver fans turning their frustration toward Quinn Hughes.
As Hughes gets set to return to Rogers Arena on Sunday night, the coach who helped revive the Canucks in 2021 and 2022 had a blunt message for the crowd.
“I hope they don’t boo,” Boudreau told Postmedia this week.
Boudreau’s view is that Hughes always handled himself like a player trying to do right by the organization that drafted him. In his eyes, the defenceman showed up, gave everything he had and tried to help the team win.
If fans are still carrying anger about how things ended, Boudreau suggested the real target should be elsewhere. He said blame Jim Rutherford, the man who fired Boudreau and traded Hughes after it became clear the captain and best defenceman in team history wasn’t going to remain beyond his current contract.
“He just did his job,” Boudreau said of Hughes.
Boudreau arrived in December 2021 with the Canucks stumbling badly out of the gate, and the change behind the bench sparked an immediate turnaround. Vancouver won its first seven games under him, though that run was interrupted by the COVID outbreak.
That stretch helped ignite a late-season push that nearly carried the club into the playoffs, and Hughes was a major part of it. Boudreau said the response from the team and the fans during that surge meant a lot to him.
The following season, though, Rutherford made it clear Boudreau was not the coach he wanted for the long term. Boudreau said the president let that become obvious quickly.
“He’d ask you how you were,” the coach recalled. “He was just a veteran guy already, who was respected.” A veteran guy - at just 22 years old.
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There was also movement on the blue line, where Jamie Oleksiak could be the odd man out while Guillaume Brisebois looks like the likeliest option to step in. Malhotra and Elias Pettersson both addressed the group's response, and the return of Quinn Hughes looms as another important piece of the picture heading into the next game. [Read more 🡒]
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Quinn Hughes came back into the conversation this week in Seattle, where the former Canucks captain spoke ahead of his first game in Vancouver since being moved to the Minnesota Wild in December. Even after leaving, Hughes made it clear he still looks back warmly on his six and a half seasons in Vancouver, a stretch in which he established franchise records and wore the captains title. It is the kind of return that can stir up a crowd before the puck even drops, especially for a player who meant so much to the organizations recent identity.
The real question now is how Canucks fans choose to greet him when he steps back onto the ice in Rogers Arena. Hughes said he does not know what to expect, which only adds another layer to a night already loaded with emotion and memory. For Vancouver, this is less about the standings than about an old face returning in a new sweater, and the reaction in the building will say plenty about how his years here are still being held. [Read more 🡒]
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For Vancouver, the question is no longer whether Cootes can keep up, but how long the organization will keep him on the patient track. General manager Ryan Johnson has made it clear the team wants to be careful with the young forward, even with his strong opening run in the minors, and that leaves fans watching for the next development step without expecting a quick NHL jump. [Read more 🡒]