One big thing has become apparent about the Vancouver Canucks throughout the past couple of seasons: there was a significant issue with the team’s culture and environment. 

The Canucks, of course, appear to be taking steps towards making sure this isn’t an issue moving forward, bringing in noted locker room influences in Luke Schenn and Brendan Gallagher. To start the process of turning the locker room over, however, Vancouver needed to part ways with some of the other players on their roster that were on expiring contracts — now-Toronto Maple Leaf Teddy Blueger being one of them. 

Having first signed with the Canucks in free-agency in 2023, Blueger entered a Canucks locker room that would ultimately go on to clinch the Pacific Division during the regular season and make the playoffs for the first time since 2020. After the 2023–24 season, he signed with Vancouver for another two years. 

Things got complicated from there. Locker room tensions resulted in multiple moves being made throughout the past two years that Blueger was part of the team, landing Vancouver at the bottom of the NHL by the end of the 2025–26 season and kick-starting their current tear-down. 

At the end of the day, Blueger sees his time in Vancouver as a learning experience. 

“I loved my time in Vancouver, made a lot of great friends. Some of those guys that I’ve been there with for three years, we went through a lot of ups and a lot of downs together, I think that helps kind of create a bond,” he told TSN in an interview. “I think, especially particularly last year, it was a very very challenging year, but probably the year that I learned the most, my biggest year of learning I think, throughout the course of my career. Just so many ups and downs, so many challenges with the team, so much change, different guys getting traded, called up, all that. It was a lot of adversity but I think also a lot of learning and growth.” 

These lessons, Blueger said, are things he’ll be taking with him as he continues his career as a member of the Maple Leafs. 

“The importance of team cohesion, culture-type stuff, what makes a team tick, what makes the guys come together, play at their best. I think the goal for any team is to kinda get to a point where you find this balance of guys caring about each other enough to where they’re willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the team and how you kind of get there, and trying to figure out how to get guys to be on the same page.” 

Creating a good locker room culture can be traced back to the little things, Blueger noted. 

“Stuff that I took for granted early in my career in Pittsburgh with Sid setting the tone is practice habits, discipline of showing up on time, being respectful to each other, to the trainers, to the staff — things like that, that I think seem like, when you take each thing on its own, it seems like a small thing, but you add them all up, it creates an environment within the facility [...] that environment’s huge and it has to be positive and one where everyone can kind of be themselves and come to work every day excited and upbeat instead of down and in a negative mindset, so that makes all the difference, I think.” 

As Vancouver begins their rebuild, it's habits like these that they'll want to work on while continuing to improve their team environment. 

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