Losing on purpose is a real strategy, and a defensible one. The Canucks, 3-16-1 through Monday's loss and losers of six straight in regulation, have every incentive to stop pretending this season is about anything but ping-pong balls. That argument is fine. What happened in a 3-1 loss to the Philadelphia Flyers is a different problem, and conflating the two is how a front office gets away with murder.
There's a temptation to make this about Rick Tocchet, because the symmetry is too good to ignore. Tocchet coached this Canucks team before leaving for Philadelphia, and on Monday his new team beat up his old one. He's fighting to keep his own job in Philadelphia after a start rough enough that his own fans were chanting for him to get fired. Somehow both fan bases landed on the same demand, which makes it tempting to cast him as the villain of Vancouver's collapse too.
Manny Malhotra is the one walking behind that bench now, and it's his team that spent most of a third period failing to get a single shot on net while Philadelphia, a team that had lost three straight of its own and was playing the second half of a back-to-back, was content to sit back and let them flail, before Vancouver finally pushed only once it was too late. A front office can choose to lose games on purpose. What Monday showed was a team that had stopped competing within games it was already losing.
RatingPulling the goaltender for the extra attacker during the Flyers' power play, after Philadelphia's goalie was whistled for a two-minute penalty, is the kind of aggressive call you make when you still believe the game is winnable. Vancouver got stuck instead in a stretch where no shots were going anywhere near the net. Real desperation means pulling the goalie and meaning it. Checking out mentally means you don't get to blame the gambit when the empty-netter goes in. Vancouver did both in the same night. That's on the bench.
The tanking defense also conveniently ignores the players still drawing a check to be part of the losing. Jake DeBrusk is still in that lineup, and his continued presence on a team going nowhere is front-office inertia: a management group that hasn't finished its own teardown. Ryan Johnson built this roster. If the plan really is to lose for a purpose, finish the job. Move the veterans who have no business playing out a lost season, and do it before the deadline instead of after fans have watched six more losses pile up.
Tanking for a draft pick is a strategy, but showing up and not competing for a period because the standings don't matter is a culture problem, and it will outlast whatever pick this costs the Canucks in the spring. Manny Malhotra inherited a bad roster. Letting his team stop playing is on him now, and six straight regulation losses, with a stretch like Monday's third period mixed in, says he's lost the room already, or never had it to begin with, a coaching failure either way, with the responsibility sitting on Malhotra now that Tocchet is long gone.
