Miller sees improvement in Canucks: 'It's fun to come to the rink again'

Punctuated by the lengthy saga that led to head coach Bruce Boudreau's firing, the Vancouver Canucks have been one of the league's most entertaining sideshows for large swaths of this season.

Veteran forward J.T. Miller said he believes his squad is leaving all the chaos behind.

"This wasn't too fun of a place to be in the beginning and mid-part of the year," he said Tuesday, per TSN's Farhan Lalji. "It was a bit of a shitshow … it really was. A lot of distraction. I think we've moved on, we understand who we're going to be moving forward. It's fun to come to the rink again."

He added, "I thought we've come together a lot as a team over the last couple of weeks. We've got to make sure we stay focused and try not to get off script here because everything we've been doing lately seems to be working for us."

The Canucks went 18-25-3 with Boudreau at the helm this campaign and won only three of Rick Tocchet's first nine games behind the bench after Vancouver made the personnel switch on Jan. 22.

However, the Canucks have gone 7-2-1 in their last 10 contests since Feb. 18, and their .750 point percentage in that span is tied for the fourth best in the league. Vancouver has also rattled off four straight wins, its longest streak of the season.

That's a far cry from where the Canucks were earlier in the campaign. They set a dubious mark to start the season by becoming the first team in NHL history to lose four consecutive games while conceding a multi-goal lead in each. Miller said after the second contest that he felt "irrelevant."

Despite the recent turnaround, a surprise playoff berth is virtually out of the question. The Canucks sit 18 points behind the Winnipeg Jets for the second wild-card spot in the Western Conference with a 28-32-5 record.

"We're playing well as a group," Miller said. "It's not about wins or losses at the end of the day right now, it's about enjoying the process of getting better as a group and having good habits and being accountable. We're starting to do that, and I think the results are showing as well."

Miller, who turned 30 on Tuesday, ranks third on the team with 36 assists and 60 points. His seven-year, $56-million extension will kick in next season.