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If the Vancouver Canucks’ leadership trust were to call their old boss, he wouldn’t hesitate to pick up the phone.
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“I would absolutely help them out,” Mike Gillis admitted on the Sekeres and Price show Thursday, when asked if the Sedin twins or Ryan Johnson were to call him for advice on running their hockey team.
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“Maybe not in a formal way, but absolutely. I think these guys are perfect for what’s going on here today. I think they’re going to do an excellent job,” Gillis, who was general manager (and later president) of the Canucks from 2008 until 2014.
“There’s obviously some things no one knows about when you take these jobs and if I can be supportive in any way I’d be happy to do it.”
It’s not an easy job, no matter who you are working for. The Sedins said they hadn’t called any of their predecessors for advice, but if they were to call, Gillis said his advice would be pretty simple.
“I think that their character, in terms of their authenticity, their integrity, they need to maintain those,” he said. “They need to be patient. They need autonomy.”
They also need to believe in their plan and defend it. Gillis doesn’t have much doubt they will.
“They have to stick with it no matter what’s going on around them,” he said.
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Henrik (l) and Daniel Sedin alongside Ryan Johnson as the club announces the appointments of the Sedins as co-presidents and Johnson as general manager at Rogers Arena in Vancouver on May 14, 2026. Photo by NICK PROCAYLO /PNG
And they also need to ignore the noise. Thankfully they’ve been through it before. Gillis himself noted how down the fan base was on the Sedins in the years before he took over as GM in 2008. The three previous seasons they’d finally developed into point-per-game players, but the great days for them were still to come: four of their five highest scoring seasons where the first four years with Gillis in charge.
In that time, Gillis came to realize how vocal and how opinionated the fans and the media can be in a Canadian hockey city, especially one where the hockey team is unrivalled in stature. As Gillis has said before, he did sometimes let that chatter, that noise, bother him.
The Sedins will know better, both because of their character but also because of their lived experience.
“You’re balancing so many issues at the same time,” he said. “In a place like Vancouver there’s a ton of public scrutiny that you have to endure and sometimes it can cause you to not be yourself entirely and get frustrated.
“I’m hopeful … I’m confident that these guys will not succumb to that kind of pressure.”
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