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Let’s face it, most teams after missing the playoffs would spend the off-season making the team stronger, and building on the strengths that they did have.  Replace the GM?  Sure.  Replace the GM with your star player’s agent?  Okay, sure, kind of icky and incestuous but okay.  Make your star’s agent the GM and then lose the star to free agency?  That’s fucking top notch dinkwallet behaviour.

So here it is, five reasons why 2008-2009 will be a year to forget for the Vancouver Canucks.

1. No Trevor Linden: he may not have been the on-ice force that the Canucks needed these last few years but he was the sort of leader who could help shape the attitude of a team, and bring in the wins.  His retirement is an unquantifiable blow to the team.
2. Mike Gillis:  Let’s face it even if bringing in Mats Sundin would have been a good move, making the move so public was only going to lead to heartache.  Not talking about players until they’re actually signed would be a good first move.  Talking about how awesome you are is generally a good way to look like a putz.  Look at the Canucks official news site and you’ll see that nearly half the stories are about who the team would like to have signed signed [vc ^[2]].  It’s even more pathetic than my list of women I’d like to have slept with.  (Though with names like Anne Hathaway & Rachael Leigh Cook on the list, who’d call that pathetic?)
3. Roberto Luongo only plays one position: Cloning isn’t legal and Luongo isn’t going to score us goals.  He’s our best goalie, possibly ever, but let’s face it we need an offense.  Of course suggestions that we trade him for a goal scorer are insane, I mean shit doesn’t anyone remember the history of the last five years?  Goalies can win games too, and you need one in the playoffs.
4. Everyone else in the West is actually good: If you’re going to making lots of mistakes, it’s always good to be in a division where everyone else are making mistakes.  The West is too focused and too difficult for the Canucks to continue to be run like a Punch and Judy show. 
5. We drafted twins: Seriously identical Swedish twins and after years of having them we still haven’t come up with any crazy twin-centric plays.  Any other team would be having them change jerseys, call each other by different names and secrelty switching one of them with the goalie to build some kind of Might Ducks style play.  Maybe we should have hired Emilio Estevez for our GM.