It’s only been two weeks since the Sedin twins and Ryan Johnson took the helm of the Canucks, and something’s changed - you just haven't heard about it, which is the point.

Ponder this: was anyone surprised at the announcement where Francesco Aquilini installed Henrik and Daniel as co-presidents and Johnson as GM? Heck no. The first gurglings of that move came a week and a half earlier, with professional hockey rumourmonger Eliotte Friedman being one of the first to state what eventually became fact.

For years, the Canucks have leaked what should be guarded secrets and internal-only communications at a colander-porous rate. Everybody and their pooch knew about the feud between Elias Pettersson (the forward who falls down a lot) and ever-toxic J. T. Miller, despite how many denials there were. The first media whisperings of the breakdown came to the forefront four-plus months, if not more, before Miller was shuffled out of town. Remember the utterly contemptuous mistreatment of Bruce Boudreau? The media reports suggesting the Canucks were talking to Rick Tocchet surfaced weeks before management finally made the switch. The whole thing stunk like a Granville Street back alley in mid-summer, and reflected poorly (but accurately) on the franchise.

Leaks and sources

In my former career as a media geek, I had sources and contacts. Good journalists foster those contacts. I basically got my start in the media business because hockey officials I knew well told me they were going to withdraw from games in protest over the fact nothing had been done after parents at an Atom hockey game locked a teenage referee in a dressing room. They didn't tell anyone else, so I published what became a national story before it actually happened. (Thirty-odd years later, not much has changed as far as official abuse goes.) Some of my best work came after people within an organization told me something I wasn't otherwise going to know. In that, I recognize a fundamental reality about rumours that later turn out to be factual: the information almost always comes from within the organization.

You scratch my back ….

The relationship between a source and a journalist is usually symbiotic: both source and journalist benefit from the information becoming public. An example might be a municipal councillor whose constituents have been clamouring for a derelict house to be torn down quietly saying, “you normally take Thursdays off, but maybe you want to work Thursday morning…. By the way, when you come into work, do you take Main Street? Maybe you should.” Said journalist now can capture images of the demolition, and conduct at-the-moment-interviews of delighted neighbours watching as the excavators do their thing, and when all that is done, doesn't it make sense to call the councillor for Ward 3 for a few quotes?

But there’s a massive difference between the councillor for Ward 3 tipping a journalist to show up for the demolition of a derelict eyesore and someone feeding media the news that Rick Tocchet is in line for Bruce Boudreau’s job. How did the bungled Boudreau firing benefit anyone in the organization? If anything, that mess should have warned us the Jim Rutherford/Patrick Allvin duo were not going to be good for the franchise.

It’s important to strike a contrast between leaks. For example, trade rumours that eventually turn out to be true can, in some cases, have a benefit to the team doing the leaking. Consider the night Tyler Myers showed up for pre-game skate but didn’t play. It didn’t take long for news to hit the circuit that Myers might be traded, as turned out to be the fact. It was in some ways beneficial for either Myers, his agent, or the Canucks to have that accidentally-but-not information become public. Maybe it helped Myers find a more desired destination. Maybe the Canucks found a better trade deal.

Other leaks are more difficult to evaluate. It is known now the Vegas Golden Knights refused to give the Edmonton Oilers permission to speak to former Knights coach Bruce Cassidy. Nobody is going to believe that Edmonton was the source of the leak: it had to have been Vegas. But what did Vegas gain from it? Simple: they sowed chaos in Edmonton, forcing a rival hockey team in the same division to fire Kris Knoblauch, assume the remainder of a lengthy contract, and all the while look utterly stupid and unprofessional. There is a cost-benefit calculus here, because there is a risk that other teams will now consider Vegas to be untrustworthy, incapable of the kind of suitable secrecy that should take place when teams are engaged in discussions with each other. (Hold onto that thought, says the retired journalist, who will return to this point shortly.)

So not all leaks are bad: it depends on who benefits, and how. But if there’s no benefit …. there should be no leak. And that lands us splat-dab back at the Canucks.

Self-inflicted injuries

With all of the above laid out, I can’t figure out any advantage or benefit gained to most of the leaks that have sprung from the Canucks the last five-odd years. Oh, sure, the “insiders” received lots of content, but tell me how the Vancouver Canucks as an organization benefited from having the sports media know that Miller and Pettersson were squabbling like two kids in elementary school?

I really respect Kevin Woodley as a media figure. The former webmaster for the Peninsula Panthers of the Vancouver Island Junior Hockey League and frequent talk-show guest has said for a long time there are problems with the Canucks culture, and in so doing showed more courage than most. He has more recently stated the fire-hose of unfettered rumours and garbage coming from the team was a key part of the degrading culture. It was likely a key factor in the team being so poorly graded by NHL agents (as per an anonymous poll published by the Athletic last month.)

Asked to address this topic on one of the talk shows recently, Woodley used a phrase on one of the talk shows that struck me as insightful: “the call is coming from inside the house.” Does it not seem the rumour river stopped the moment former president Jim Rutherford was no longer part of the team?

Appearances matter

In that Athletic story, agents said the Vancouver Canucks were a difficult management to deal with, and that communications were problematic. It's easy to see why, and it goes beyond the "do I speak to Allvin or Rutherford, because we all know who is in charge" conundrum of the previous regime. Ponder this – if you’re the general manager of another team interested in trading a key player, will you start conversations with Detroit, which is known as a black hole for communications because they’re essentially so damn tight that not a whisper squeaks through, or risk a discussion with Vancouver knowing that doing so will result your player learning he's on the trade block from a sports pundit who was given an inside secret and is now blathering said secret to the masses? I can't help but think the piss-poor information control exhibited by Vancouver has been a key part of the difficulties in trading for meaningful assets or securing free agents. It is certain that players and agents are well aware Vancouver has for a long time been a broken organization with a constant churning river of rumours and toxic sludge.

You can’t be respected unless you act like you should be, and the Canucks have not acted like they want to be respected. I’ll relate it to my current job as a building official: if I show up unannounced on a construction site and see everyone in safety gear, with floors swept, plans readily available in a defined location, and a site supervisor who can answer all my questions, I’m likely going to have far more confidence than if I arrive for a scheduled inspection to find the place in total shambles, with nobody in charge, and the drywall crew hotboxing the plans room.

I'll let the dear reader (if there are any) figure out which of the above two situations the Canucks most resembled the last five years, and I suspect the answer carries a certain Pepe Le Pew odour.

Sounds of silence

Five days after the change in leadership, the new trio in charge of the Vancouver Canucks surprised the hockey world by axing woefully incompetent coach Adam Foote, as well as all of the support staff (except for, interestingly, goaltender coach Marko Torenius). It's not that announcement was unexpected in and of itself, the collective hockey media just had no clue it would happen when it did.  This is one of those instances where a subtle shift in the English language carries a world of meaning.

1. The hockey world was not surprised at the announcement.
2. The hockey world was surprised by the announcement.

The difference here is not the negation, but the preposition. As a consumer of way too many hockey podcasts while I drive from construction site to construction site on the taxpayer dime, I can assure you the hockey pundits were caught off guard by the announcement Foote had been relieved of duties. Not a one had a clue.

Likewise, there hasn’t been a single whisper – not one – about the search for a replacement coach. Sure, everybody and their pooch is speculating that Manny Malhotra will be promoted from the baby ‘nucks to the big club. But even the professional rumourmongers are speculating. In absence of any real intelligence, the poor sports jocks at Sportsnet 650 are left regurgitating the concerns they don't know what's going on. The angst is palpable. (Are there interviews? Are they negotiating? Why haven't they scheduled a press conference? Who will the assistants be? Will they wait for the draft to ensure there aren't two Malhotras on the team? Next up, a special segment with special guest Don Taylor, who will spend 20 minutes telling us he has also heard nothing. Then we'll discuss if the nothing means something, and if so, what that something is.)

Well, wait a second here. Why should we know about the deliberations on the next hiring? Is it not better – for the franchise, not the sports jocks – if we don’t know a damn thing?

The Sedins and Johnson will ultimately be judged on a far greater body of work, but as the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Two weeks into their new gig, the Sedin/Johnson triumvirate seem to have stopped leaks that crippled this organization’s reputation. It almost makes me believe the new management might be running the hockey team in a manner one would expect of a professionally run, multimillion-dollar business.

Vern Faulkner is a former journalist, photographer and editor, whose works appeared eons ago in various things the oldsters call "newspapers" and "magazines." (He also assumed responsibility for the Peninsula Panthers website after Woodley got a gig with Associated Press.) While he now resides in New Brunswick, Faulkner retains sufficient connections to the Wet Coast to correctly use the term "hotbox" in context, while intentionally mis-spelling West Coast in a tagline for humour.