October 28, 2022 by Ryan Lotsberg

The Vancouver Canucks’s season has gotten off to a terrible start. They finally won their first game on Thursday night when they beat the Seattle Kraken. Their blue line has taken a beating. Tucker Poolman, Quinn Hughes, Riley Stillman, and Travis Dermott are all injured. Their defence was weak to start with, but the injuries haven’t helped at all. 

They made a move to supplement their depth by sending a 5th round pick in the 2023 draft to the Carolina Hurricanes in exchange for Ethan Bear and Lane Pederson on Friday. Carolina is also retaining a portion of Bear’s salary. Bear has 47 points in 193 NHL games played with the Edmonton Oilers and the Carolina Hurricanes.

The 25-year old was originally drafted by the Oilers in the 5th round in 2015. That was the Connor McDavid draft year, but it was also the same year the Oilers took Caleb Jones (4th round) and John Marino (6th round). Drafting those three defencemen with mid to late round picks was slick work by the Oilers, but none of them are with the franchise anymore. Bear played the most games with the Oilers (132) of those three.

Bear was viewed as an up and coming prospect. He earned a spot on the top pairing in Edmonton with Darnell Nurse out of camp in the 2019-20 season, and he played well enough in that role to make people think that he could be a fixture on the Oilers blue line for many years to come.

That’s not how it went down though. Bear was in a contract dispute with the Oilers approaching the 2020-21 season. He signed at the last possible moment before camp started, and it took him a while to catch up to the rest of the league. A puck struck him in the head while he was sitting on the bench during a game early that season, and he missed time as a result. He wasn’t the same player upon returning from that injury. 

He made a costly giveaway in the third period of game four of the Oilers’ first round playoff series against the Winnipeg Jets. He passed the puck up the middle of the ice and it was intercepted by Blake Wheeler. Mark Scheifele eventually scored on that play. That goal tied the game, and the game went to overtime. The Jets would go on to win the game in triple overtime, which gave them the series sweep over the Oilers. Bear played 14:02 in that game, compared to Nurse’s 62:07. Then coach Dave Tippett shortened the bench for the overtime period, and Bear didn’t play for the rest of the night after his turnover.

Bear was a popular player in Edmonton, but he received hateful messages on social media after that game. Bear’s girlfriend (now fiancée) stood up for him online, and he released a formal statement video about the issue.

He spoke about these events in a video called “Uninterrupted” by EA Sports. I invite you to watch the entire video, but the relevant quote begins at 2:22 of the video:

“…it just felt like I lost us the whole series, you know, the way people were treating me, trying to make me the scapegoat like the reason why we lost. No, I wasn’t. It was one play. So for me, like when I had all that and, you know, you see everything on social media whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and all it is is racism; and then you get all of these DMs and for myself, it was really just like shocking that people would go so low.”

“I didn’t want to go to our team party at the end of the year, I didn’t want to do a lot of things. I just kind of wanted to stay by myself. It was terrible.”

The online hate that Bear received was disgusting behaviour. Bear was traded to Carolina later that summer in exchange for Warren Foegele. Nobody knows for sure if Bear requested a trade out of Edmonton after that or not, but it’s hard to imagine him wanting to stay after listening to him speak about the ordeal. It was an awful way for Bear’s tenure as an Oiler to come to an end.

Bear would play in 58 games for the Hurricanes in the 2021-22 season. He was a healthy scratch during the playoffs in 2022. Bear signed a one year, $2.2 million contract with the Hurricanes this summer shortly before his scheduled arbitration hearing. He was a healthy scratch for the Hurricanes in all of their games thus far in the 2022-23 season. He was waiting for a trade to happen because the Hurricanes made it clear that he did not fit into their plans.

I’m personally happy that Bear is going to a team where he will have an opportunity to play. He’s a legitimate NHL defenceman, so he deserves a shot somewhere. Hopefully he finds a home with the Canucks.