Canucks slip into 9th, Vancouver slips into coma
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Watching the Vancouver Canucks this year has been like watching a child with a high IQ, and artistic promise start sniffing glue and hanging around the smoke pit at school. Starting off the season as one of the most talked about teams, one of the clubs that was going to be fighting it out to finish at the top of the league and then win the Cup.
Instead the team is struggling to even make the playoffs, and are in a position where they need to finish the season by being nearly perfect while hoping that Edmonton and San Jose lose games.
So what is happening? Is the entire team on ether? I could accept if we were in this position because we lost our starting goaltender, but Auld has been so much better than Cloutier that I think it’s actually helped us.
So what’s the deal Vancouver, where did it all go wrong?
Like everything else, it went wrong one little step at a time. One game at a time. They lose one game against a weaker team. Then a second. Then one more. And on it goes.
If the Canucks had actually won as few as three games that they should have won, but didn’t, they’d be in a very different position now (93 points instead of 87). Mathematically, they could still be eliminated, but they probably wouldn’t be.
I’ve got a half-written song about the Canucks and their fans, “The Streets of Vancouver”, which I could finish writing when they are officially eliminated from the playoffs.
So much for the 12-year cycle of getting to the Stanley Cup final. Unless, of course, you don’t count the lockout year, in which case this is only year 11, and the Canucks are destined to go to the final next year.