Canucks’ Sedin twins to retire after season

Associated Press

VANCOUVER, British Columbia

Vancouver Canucks forwards Henrik Sedin and Daniel Sedin announced they will retire at the end of the season.

The 37-year-old twins disclosed their plans Monday in a letter on the team’s website before addressing media later.

The Sedins are in their 17th season in the NHL, all with Vancouver. They led the Canucks to within one game of winning the 2011 Stanley Cup.

“There’s been a lot of talk,” Henrik Sedin said at Rogers Arena. “We felt the longer the season went, it became clearer to us this was going to be our last year.”

“It’s a happy day for all of us,” Daniel Sedin added. “We’re really comfortable where we’re at.”

They relived the tough early times when they were criticized for being too slow and soft, the high-flying glory days, the crushing defeats, and the last three seasons that have seen the Canucks lose more combined games than any other team in the league.

“It’s always tough losing,” said Daniel Sedin, who along with his brother will play just three more NHL games. “But with the team we had, you have to stay positive, you have to keep playing the right way, and trying to teach the young guys.”

Heading into the final year of their contracts, the Sedins penned an open letter in the fall stating their desire to remain with the only franchise they’ve ever known — even if it meant forgoing the chance at a Stanley Cup elsewhere.

“We know we had the best jobs in the world,” Henrik Sedin said Monday. “We tried to treat it that way. ... We haven’t looked too far ahead or we haven’t looked back. I’m sure we will after this is done.”

The twins said in their letter Monday that they originally wanted to wait until after this season to make a decision, but they decided the time was right to make the call.

Selected second and third overall at the 1999 draft after the Canucks made a series of trades to grab both brothers, the Sedins have been the faces of the franchise for more than a decade. However, it wasn’t initially a smooth transition from Sweden to North America.

“There’s lot of people that believed in us early on that were part of this organization,” Henrik Sedin said. “If they would have listened to a lot of voices out of this room, it would have been easy to trade us because we didn’t live up to the hype.”