There are plenty of signs that hockey season has arrived, but for the Vancouver Canucks, one of the most familiar is a shift behind the counter at Tim Hortons.
This year, the promotional stop handed the drive-thru headset to Tom Willander and Zeev Buium, with the two young defensemen taking part in the club’s annual Tim Hortons stint. It’s become a recurring part of the Canucks’ early-season routine, with Tyler Myers and Marcus Pettersson filling the role last year and Conor Garland and Dakota Joshua doing it the year before that.
For Buium and Willander, the assignment came with its own set of challenges.
“You can barely use the mic,” the 20-year-old said. “And then you’ve got to put in all the orders and all the s-t’s everywhere.
It was tough. And then it’s just go, go, go.
Line never ends.”
Willander said the drive-thru was a whole different kind of grind.
“It was so hard,” said Willander. “I would have never thought that working a drive-thru would be that difficult. Tell you what, it’s a lot easier to play hockey, at least for me.
“I was working the order taking and, oh man, you’d hear the items they were saying every one in five times, and the times you actually heard it, you got a list of like 150 items,” he added.
The timer didn’t make life any easier. Willander pointed to the clock that starts after an order is taken and turns red if the process runs past 40 seconds.
“[You had to be] under 40 seconds [or] the numbers turned red, and I don’t think we had a single one in the green.
“It was definitely easier just talking to the person in the drive-thru and just sending whatever was coming through out there.”
Even with the chaos, Buium said the experience still delivered the usual payoff for the duo.
“Every time Tom and I get together and do something like that, we have a good time. So I enjoyed it."
Their Tim Hortons outing was another off-ice moment for a pair of defensemen who have already spent time together in a range of settings, from their lip-sync performance at the Canucks' Dice & Ice to ‘fight club’ practices with defenceman Elias Pettersson.
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