In this upside-down, off-kilter world of the pandemic, our city’s major-league sports franchises have found themselves in the polar-opposite positions of where they thought they’d now be.
Their three sudden dilemmas – two of them problems, one an opportunity – are major-league leadership challenges. The decisions about them stand to be important influences in the community. They are great case studies for any proprietor.
The Vancouver Canucks, BC Lions and Whitecaps FC franchises represent vital social and economic ingredients of our identity. When they succeed, there is an unconscious civic lift; when they founder, the result is communal dispiritedness.
The most positive of these dilemmas faces the Major League Soccer Whitecaps. They have been a low-budget team in a smaller-budget league, and since they sold marquee player Alphonso Davies to Bayern Munich in 2018, they have certainly played the part. It hurt the team in the pandemic to host home games in Portland one season and Salt Lake City for much of the other.
In last place much of this season, drawing ties like a Ted Lasso-coached team, the humiliation of losing to a semi-pro Victoria squad earlier in the summer prompted the firing of coach Mark dos Santos and the promotion of their interestingly titled “director of methodology,” Vanni Sartini.
To be fair, few expected much. But Sartini’s superhuman energy and methodological direction breathed life into the team and, lo and behold, on the last game of the season the Whitecaps qualified for the playoffs. The first-round loss a week ago was still a victory in the bigger picture because there is clear evidence of potential. Sartini is the talk of the town.
But here’s the rub: the team has exceeded fan expectations yet fuelled them at the same time. A window is open to invest in the business to be more than a playoff qualifier and to elevate the Whitecaps into a larger fan draw than any other Vancouver sports team. The off-season is a crossroads for the franchise under owners Greg Kerfoot, Steve Luczo, Jeff Mallett and Steve Nash, which has the fourth-lowest payroll among 27 teams. It could just muddle through or set a quick course to be all-in.
This is a dilemma both the Canucks and Lions would love to have, but as any sports fan knows, their respective problems are layered and deep for the owners to solve.
The Lions came under new ownership early in the season. Industrialist Amar Doman is a respected, dedicated business figure, but his dream of securing the Canadian Football League (CFL) franchise has produced a recent batch of night terrors.
Worse than the Whitecaps’ pandemic exile in America, the CFL didn’t even play in 2020 and could only convene a shortened 2021 season. But most everyone expected that new coach Rick Campbell and the league’s best quarterback in Michael Reilly would reverse the fortunes of a desultory 2019, its worst season in more than a decade.
In the CFL it takes a lot to miss the playoffs – only three of nine teams do. Under its idiosyncratic playoff format, the Lions could actually represent the East in any Grey Cup game.
But any on-paper evaluation of a business strategy is only as good as its in-person execution of the plan. Reilly had clearly been nursing an injury much of the year, and the team appeared to be drawing a hapless place-kicker from ticket holders or a random draw in the Lower Mainland. An eight-game losing streak in a 14-game season, even in the CFL, is fatal to fortunes.
Now Doman has to implement more of a turnaround than even he banked on. His core problem is one that neither the Whitecaps nor (for the time being at least) the Canucks have: drawing fans to the stadium. The CFL is itself in distress in Toronto and here. BC Place is cavernous without large crowds, the concession contract with the team is lopsided, and the real estate-savvy Doman knows he has to take the team nearly down to the studs. Reilly may not return, even if at about $575,000 he is well-paid by league standards. (No CFL player makes even the National Football League minimum salary of US$660,000.) Doman has a mittful.
Of course, there is a Millionaire’s Club over at Rogers Arena, where it is possible that the team will set a new record for the earliest date its playoff aspirations are thwarted. Theirs is, like the Lions’ and Whitecaps’, not at all the anticipated outcome.
While the Canucks surprised the fan base in the pandemic bubble in the playoffs to end the 2019-20 season, it lost the plot in 2020-21 in empty arenas playing only other Canadian teams, all but one of them superior. Many thought that Canadian-only competition was a mere bump on the road on the weaving highway to Stanley Cup contention. Instead, it seems a cliff and the team lacks headlights to avoid sailing off it.
Some of this mess falls to the management (who will likely take the fall), quite a bit of it to the players (star Elias Pettersson looks as if an academically inclined identical twin suddenly donned his uniform), but a helping of the goo belongs to owner Francesco Aquilini.
When the team’s business model broke in the spring of 2020, ownership opted not to buy out some contracts of players before the next season who were past their best-before date. The sudden frugality after seasons of spending prevented wise retention or investment in key pieces within a salary cap to advance on the bubble opportunity. Instead the team delayed a reset to this off-season and found that others had used that Canucks hesitation to move into the passing lane. There is scant chemistry to the new assemblage so far. They will need a Sartini-like resurgence.
The plan until this season was to contend for the Cup by next season. The reality is yet another rebuild and, like many realities, awfully removed from expectation and epitome. Groan, sigh. •
Kirk LaPointe is publisher and editor-in-chief of BIV and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.
