The Vancouverite picked up a story last night about a rumour that’s been going around the internet for a few days now, since the Canuck’s goalier Dan Cloutier went out for the rest of the season with a knee injury.

The story [van] goes that Cloutier isn’t actually injuried but rather he’s under police investigation for running a road block in his Porsche Cayanne and then hitting another car in an accident that killed two of the other car’s passangers.  The Vancouverite has the relevant links but it all seems a bit fishy to me.

First off why hasn’t someone related to the victims come forward? 

Secondly why would the Canucks organization risk looking incredibly terrible and lie about Cloutier’s injury to cover up such an accident?  Cloutier’s injury would have to have been checked by team doctor’s so it’s the Canucks that made the call that he won’t be playing for the rest of the year and the public relations shit storm that covering the deaths of two people up for a player would cause would do such incredible damage to the team that it wouldn’t even be an option.  If this was true the Canucks would stay away from it, and let Cloutier deal with the issue himself.  They certainly would not lie for him, even if he was the greatest goalie ever. 

Thirdly why haven’t we heard of it as anything more than internet rumours?  I know the press in Vancouver treat the Canucks with kid gloves, and certainly don’t go out of their way to publish personal attacks on the team, but a story this big would have broken by now.  The rumours seem to indicate that the story is going to surface in the mainstream media in a week.  If they do this story will be bigger than Bertuzzi’s on-ice antics, and if the Canucks actually did lie for Cloutier then anyone involved in that decision will be out of Vancouver by the end of the season, and the damage to the team will be worse than a decade of missing the playoffs.

My guess is that elements of the story may be true, perhaps Cloutier was in a car accident that damaged his already injuried knee, but I’m positive that the Canucks are not having their number one netminder fake a knee injury while they try to sweep the deaths of two people under a rug somewhere.

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