CALGARY — Brian Burke was complimenting Ryan Kesler in Toronto Monday when he said Kesler “Wakes up grumpy, comes to the rink grumpy.”
“Used to,” Kesler told us later in the day. “Not anymore.”
Full disclosure: When Ryan Kesler was a Vancouver Canuck, he was a grouch. To the media, to the Canucks support staff at times, and even to teammates, to the point where he became a negative influence around the team.
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We thought he was just a moody guy. Now we’ve come to find out, Vancouver’s rainy winters were at fault. Because on a sunny day east of the Rockies Monday, Kesler was the most pleasant interview subject he’s been in the 10 years we have been walking up to his stall, notepad in hand.
“When you wake up every day looking at the sunshine, it’s hard to be grumpy every day,” he said, now a member of the Anaheim Ducks. “It’s a new chapter of my life, and it’s going well. I take this game seriously. I think that’s what (Burke) meant.”
Kesler returns this week to Vancouver, the team that drafted him 23rd overall back in 2003, for a Wednesday practice and a Thursday night game against the Canucks. “Going back to the city where I lived my young adulthood. I grew up there. Well, I didn’t grow up there, but I went there when I was 19 and left when I was 30. I went there as a kid, and left with a wife and two kids.”
Emotions will be high. There are the people he’ll be happy to see, and the people or elements of the Canucks organization that he wanted to get away from when he told general manager Jim Benning last summer that he was ready to move on.
It’s the one question Kesler will not entertain: “Why did you tell Benning you were ready to leave?” It is his right, and he neither answers the question nor questions its premise.
“In respect to Jim and Trevor (Linden), those are private conversations. I’ll leave it at that.”
Kesler, now 30, became a divisive figure in Vancouver. The fact he was willing to be dealt away at the trade deadline last season was seen by some teammates — certainly one that I have spoken with — as an act by a guy who was ready to jump ship the moment the waters got rough.
The core group of Canucks players had stuck together through mostly good times, making the playoffs for five straight seasons until last year. Suddenly, in the first year with some serious adversity, Kesler was out of there, waiving his no-trade clause and giving management a list of places he’d go.
“It was somebody we tried to get at the trade deadline,” confirmed Anaheim coach Bruce Boudreau, “and it didn’t work. The opportunity came up in the summer … and it did work. When they’re both playing at the top of their game, the two Ryans (Kesler and Getzlaf), it’s pretty hard for teams to deal with.”
Kesler is positively sunny after a late afternoon practice at the Saddledome, with plenty of time to chat with two media members. It’s a far cry from Vancouver, where he sat just a couple of stalls down from the Roberto Luongo and Cory Schneider Show, the epicenter of a room that housed more drama in the last five years than any five NHL dressing rooms combined.
So he becomes the prototype for that player who paid his dues in a Canadian market, where a player of Kesler’s stature has “got to be ‘on’ 24-7.” In Anaheim he can take his three kids — aged nine, four and almost two — to the beach or McDonald’s in complete privacy. Who wouldn’t prefer that?
“I believe it kind of allows us to be us in our locker room a lot more, without the media presence there. I’ve really enjoyed that,” he said. “There was a lot of drama (in Vancouver), and the guys dealt with it well. Do they want to? Probably not. But it’s a part of being in a Canadian market. You’re going to have to deal with it every day.”
He is happy and productive in Anaheim, gone from being Henrik Sedin’s No. 2 centre in Vancouver to working underneath Getzlaf in SoCal.
“1-A, 1-B. That’s the way I think about it,” he says with a smile. He was on a Vancouver team that got to the top of the mountain in 2011 and came up a game short versus Boston. Now he’s on another legit contender, being asked if these Ducks have what it takes to earn him his first Stanley Cup ring.
“It’s so tough to say, right?” he says. “Right now, you look around the room, yeah, we do have what it takes. But saying that, you need a lot of things to go right. You need to stay healthy. You need to get hot at the right time. But, yeah, looking around this room? We do have what it takes.”
It’s a view Kesler likes, inside a Ducks room with far fewer cameras and microphones, and a lot less Mike Gillis-fuelled drama. And outside, no rain.
Who wouldn’t be in a better mood?
