John Garrett, the former Vancouver Canucks colour commentator and long-time presence around the club, has died at 74.
Garrett spent two decades as a mainstay on Sportsnet broadcasts for the Vancouver Canucks and retired as a Canucks analyst at the end of the 2022-2023 regular season, leaving a voice familiar to fans across those years.
The numbers underline why his passing lands as news: he was 74; he joined the Canucks organization in 1983 after a mid-season trade on February 4, 1983; and he spent three seasons as a player with Vancouver from 1983 to 1986 before carving out a far longer chapter as a broadcaster.
Those facts frame a career that bridged locker room and living room. Garrett was a former netminder who became known to a generation of viewers for his analysis and on-air presence, and for the nickname he carried in clubhouse lore: "Cheech." He remained identified with the Canucks from the moment the team acquired him in that February 1983 trade until his retirement from the broadcast booth four decades later.
Context helps explain why the news matters now. Garrett’s retirement came only at the close of the 2022-2023 regular season, so his exit from the booth was recent and still felt by those who follow the team closely. For many fans the Canucks’ game-day soundtrack for the past twenty years included his commentary, and that continuity made him a familiar figure beyond the usual turnover in sports media.
The friction in the story is simple: his playing tenure with Vancouver was brief compared with his long public association with the club. He spent three seasons on the ice for the Canucks in the mid-1980s, yet he became, for many, more of a Canucks institution as a broadcaster than he ever was as a netminder. That contrast—short on-ice years, long and sustained off-ice presence—shaped how generations of fans came to know him.
For team followers the trade that brought Garrett to Vancouver on February 4, 1983, marks the first chapter; his two-decade run on Sportsnet and his retirement at the end of the 2022-2023 regular season mark the last. Between those bookends, he moved from wearing pads to wearing a microphone, and the microphone kept him in the public view long after his playing days ended.
This is not an obituary of seasons or statistics but of a relationship. Garrett’s identity in Vancouver was not only as a one-time player but as a persistent voice at the side of the game. Even players whose careers he had once shared the ice with were introduced to a new generation through his analysis, which is why his death registers as more than the passing of a former athlete: it is the loss of a steady interpretive voice for a franchise’s fans.
Viewed plainly, the lasting fact is this: John Garrett will be remembered less for the three seasons he spent between the pipes and more for the two decades he helped shape how Vancouverites watched their team. That is the legacy he leaves behind—one that begins with a February 4, 1983 trade and ends with a retirement at the close of the 2022-2023 regular season, and now with his death at 74.
