Canucks Legend Pavel Bure RIPS Current Team Management for Miller/Pettersson Affair

Pavel Bure is a Vancouver Canucks legend. With three 50-goal seasons with the team, including two 60-goal campaigns, he is the greatest and most electrifying player ever to suit up in Canucks colours. His seven seasons in Vancouver are unparalleled. 

So when Bure was asked about his thoughts on the drama and controversy that has engulfed the team this season around the Elias Petterson & JT Miller fiasco, which resulted in a trade of Miller to the New York Rangers, people listened. 

Bure, who is keeping tabs on the 4 Nations Face-Off event (despite his disappointment that his homeland isn't competing: "Without Russia, it’s not complete"), had a strong opinion on where the blame lies in the Canucks chaos, in an exclusive interview with rg.org.:

If you’ve got a talented player who doesn’t fit into the team, that’s a failure of management. If it gets to the point where you have to trade him, something has already gone wrong.

The Miller/Pettersson feud seemed to be under control last year when the Canucks had a tremendous regular season and played a couple of rounds in the playoffs. But things imploded in the 2024-25 campaign, and rumors started to play out early on that their two top centers were so much at odds, that one of them had to be dealt. 

Canucks president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford, who seems to be implicated by Bure's comments, came out shortly before the Miller trade to say that there was "no good solution" to keep the two together.  

Bure, after 7 seasons with the Canucks & 3 1/2 years with the Florida Panthers,  finished his career with the team that benefited from the Canucks' unresolvable situation this year, as the NY Rangers landed Miller in a trade for Filip Chytil, Victor Mancini, and a first-round pick in the 2025 NHL Draft. 

Bure finished his career with five 50+ goal seasons, and six All-Star nods.

Photo: Håkan Dahlström (dahlstroms, at flickr), CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons