“I want us to play up-beat, puck possession, move-the-puck quickly, force teams into mistakes, high-transition game. I think we have the personnel to do it. If we don’t have the personnel to do it, they’ll be changed.”

“I’m tired of chasing a moving target. We’re going to get back to the fundamentals and principles that I believe in, and that’s how we’re going to play. If people don’t want to comply – we did this six years ago, we made hard choices – those hard choices are going to come again if we don’t see people that get on the same page.”

Both quotes courtesy Canucks general manager Mike Gillis, this morning in a revealing interview on TEAM 1040 radio in Vancouver. (For audio, click here.)

And that, folks, is why we’ve been writing so much about the Vancouver Canucks’ style of play under head coach John Tortorella.

See:

—- Is Tortorella’s system to blame for Canucks’ woes?

—- Three things the Canucks haven’t done well under Torts

—- ‘They play so slow,’ says scout on Torts-coached Canucks

And you didn’t need to read too closely between the lines to hear Gillis deliver a strong message to his coach — either get on board with how the GM wants the team to play, or you’re gone.

Unless, of course, it’s the GM who’s fired and not the coach, a possibility Gillis admitted was real.

After all, it would be completely unfair to ignore Gillis’s role in the Canucks getting away from the “fundamentals and principles” in which he believes. Unless it was his evil twin who said in May that, after losing to Boston in 2011, losing to Los Angeles in 2012, and losing to San Jose in 2013, Vancouver needed to adjust its style away from the one in which he “principally agrees.”

Let’s be clear: it was Gillis who was calling for his team’s style to change first, not Tortorella. The hiring of the coach — a coach, it should be noted, whose philosophy couldn’t have been more different than the one the organization had so carefully cultivated during the GM’s tenure — came after.

Which is why today’s interview was as close as Vancouver sports fans have come to hearing Gillis admit he was wrong. He thought the Canucks needed to change. It was an error in judgment.

“The running of this team is my responsibility,” Gillis said. “I really feel that over the last couple of seasons, we’ve chased goalposts that have been moving and got away from our core principles of how I want this team to play, and how we want to perform, and the tempo that we want to play with.

“People love to pick someone to blame, but the reality is, as an organization, we’ve deviated from some of the things that made us successful, and some of the things that I know will be successful. We’re going to get back to those levels. We’re going to get back to that style of play that we started six years ago. We have the personnel to do it, and we just have to be committed and have the guts to be able to carry it out.”