He is 26 years old and already seven seasons into his National Hockey League career. And still Brandon Sutter gets a little homesick when he leaves his place in Sylvan Lake, Alta., at the end of summer to get ready for hockey season.
Sutter will feel better when he visits the Vancouver Canucks’ front office, where general manager Jim Benning is from Edmonton and hockey operations president Trevor Linden is from Medicine Hat and head coach Willie Desjardins is from Climax, Sask., near the Alberta border.
As the people who run the Canucks renovate the aging team and imbue it with their blue-collar ideals, it would be naive to think Sutter’s birthplace and upbringing were irrelevant in the July 28 trade that brought him back to Western Canada from Pittsburgh.