When Alex Edler arrived in Vancouver, he was a youngster in the fast lane who just wanted to play hockey and focus on doing his job every night.
Now, Alex Edler has returned to Vancouver to sign a one-day contract and retire as a Canuck. He looks back on his time in Vancouver with so much love for the city and fan base and credits the leaders he had when he was young for helping him realize what his relationship with Vancouver meant.
“I could take a step back and see the bigger picture,” said Edler about what it meant to grow into adulthood in Vancouver. “I had such good leaders like Markus Naslund, Daniel and Henrik Sedin, Trevor Linden and Mattias Ohlund. Just being able to have them there and just hang around them and learn from them was huge for me. And then, as I got older, I met my future wife here and we had two kids.”
There used to be an excitement level for going home to Sweden after a Canucks season, but Edler grew to love his time in the city of Vancouver, and it helped that he met his wife here and she had family in the area.
“Because my wife grew up here, we had family on her side that we would always come back early in the summer and spend a month here before training camp, which I thought was always awesome because the summers here are great. I always enjoyed that,” Edler said.
Edler thinks back to his time as a Canucks and there are two separate overarching memories of his time in the blue and green.
The first is the relationships he built with his teammates.
Edler played 10 or more seasons with each of Daniel Sedin, Henrik Sedin, Chris Tanev, Alex Burrows, and Jannik Hansen.
Edler has all the respect in the world for those players but his relationship with Hansen shares a special bond. These two met each other at the 2004 draft and lived in Manitoba together while they were playing for the Canucks erstwhile AHL club, the Manitoba Moose.
As for Edler and his relationship with the Sedins, it was all about following the leaders.
“There were a lot of good people and a lot of players that set the standard so high in my time with Vancouver,” said Edler. “The twins have done that for so many years, and their standard is still so high. Everyone else tried to follow them back then.”
The second distinct memory for Edler is the support from the city.
That support showed in droves during the Canucks’ run to the cup in the 2010-11 season.
“We were a good team, and going into the playoffs, because we lost against Chicago two years in a row before that, and having them in the first round, it was an intense challenge. I think we were the better team, but Chicago won three cups in a short amount of time. So, they had a team that knew how to win,” said Edler.
“Playing them in the first round, when we beat them, we gained a lot of confidence. It was such a great feeling. It was playoff hockey, which is the most fun hockey, and then in the city, there were fans everywhere. So many flags and jerseys everywhere you went. You could really feel that you had the entire city behind you.”
For our own wondering mind, we asked and Edler shared his side of the story of how the Canucks drafted out of a lower-level league in Sweden.
“I guess I was pretty lucky because I don't think there was anyone paying too much interest in that league that I was playing in, but I know that someone told someone else to just maybe come look at me. And someone did. I guess they liked me and that's about it. When I heard that someone was coming, I didn't even believe it at first. I thought it was a prank when they first called me.”
The Canucks ultimately drafted Edler 91st overall and the rest was history.
With 1030 games played in the league, Edler earned respect in his time and though he didn’t have the loudest voice in the room, his voice carried weight behind it like one of his blue line wrist shots.
“I’m a quiet guy, and he’s quiet until you get to know him, but, once I got to know him a bit, he was such a good teammate and an excellent leader out there,” said Brock Boeser, who was Edler’s teammate from 2017-2021. “He always competed hard. I became really close with him over the years, and he is just so kind and such a great person to be around."
Edler made a tremendous impact in the community with his work away from the rink and his longevity on the ice along with his high level of talent made him a fan favourite for many years.
INSIDER EXTRA
Brock Boeser shared a story with us about Alex Edler and we checked the facts with Edler when we sat down with him.
I thought we could share it here in our ‘Insider Extra’ portion of the article.
“In my first year, I was a little intimidated by him,” said Boeser of Edler.
“He's quiet and he was a guy that didn't care if you were net-front in practice, he ripped the puck as hard as he could every time,” said Boeser with a laugh.
“That's one thing that sticks out,” Boeser continued as a smile developed. “He didn't care. And then if he hits you, he just skates back to the redline or something and doesn’t even say anything. It's like, ‘What the heck.’ But no, he was such a good guy for me when I came into this league.”
When we brought this story to Edler, he smiled and leaned back in his chair while he chuckled.
“Maybe I learned that from Mattias Ohlund too,” Edler said.
“Ohlund would always shoot high and then if he hit someone, he would just laugh. I guess that’s something I’ve learned from him.”
“As for Brock, I always thought that if you screened the right way and were in the middle, you could move to either side of the puck and dodge it. If you’re standing beside the net to tip the puck, it’s harder to dodge it. Maybe Brock was standing beside the net too much when he was young,” said Edler with a smirk.
