With the fate of General Motors in doubt [nyt] the Vancouver Canucks’ home ice may soon be needing a new sponsor, or at least a new name.  Here are a few ideas for what we may be calling GM Place next season.

1. Money Mart Place: In this economy Money Mart might be the only business with cash to spare. 
2. Fat City Arena: See this eariler Vancouver Five for explanation [mbv].
3. Rogers Place: There was a well fairly decent rumour that Rogers tried to buy the naming rights to BC Place, but the city would not let them change the roof’s colour to Rogers’ red.  But hey they need to do something with all that iPhone money.
4. Happy Planet Juice Centre: I think the founder of that company might have some pull with city council [wp].  Plus wouldn’t that just please the pants off the rest of Canada who see us all as hippies anyway?
5. Trevor Linden Memorial Rink: In the future when Trevor Linden signle handedly fixes the economy before leading the negotiations that see our alien invaders surrender, we’ll be quite happy to name the Canucks’ home ice after him.

Mats Sundin playing for the Leafs

Mats Sundin

• Age signing for Canucks: 37
• Canucks Rival Played For: Toronto Maple Leafs
• Team Leader Replacing: Marcus Naslund, Trevor Linden
• Number of Stanley Cups Won: 0
• Selection of Awards Won: Mark Messier Leadership Award, Regular All-Star, Regular for Swedish National Team

Mark Messier playing for the Canucks, remember that?

Mark Messier

• Age When Signing for Canucks: 36
• Canucks Rivals Played For: Edmonton Oilers, New York Rangers
• Team Leader Replacing: Trevor Linden
• Number of Stanley Cups Won: 6 (all prior to coming to Vancouver)
• Selection of Awards Won: Conn Smythe Trophy, Regular All-Star, Regular Appearing for the Canadian National Team, ranked as the 12th best player ever by The Hockey News.

Photos:
Mark Messier by: Håkan Dahlström from Flickr
Mats Sundin by: mlynaugh from Flickr

I want to like the Vancouver Canucks, I really do. I want to feel like they’re my team, and try I’ve given it my all to root for them [mbv]. For God’s sake I’ve lived in British Columbia for the past twenty-four years, it’s about time I consider myself a Canucks fan. Right?

The thing is those formative years spent in Edmonton are powerful, and especially during the time I was there. Memory and nostalgia are a hard thing to overcome, which is why the good ol’ days always seem better than they were. It’s even harder to put aside the past when the past could kick the present’s ass on the ice any day of the week.

It’s not the Canucks’ fault that they’re not as good as the Oilers of my youth, because… well because nobody is. The team that I grew up with was the greatest hockey team the world has seen, and probably will ever see again until the NHL shrinks down to a smaller size. All the big money teams that the Red Wings or Colorado might try to put together will never compete with the Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s, it was just so good.

How good was it? It was so good that even the people who lived in the shadow of the giants like Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier and Paul Coffey are bound for the Hockey Hall of Fame. Yesterday Vancouver born Glen Anderson was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame [nhl] as a further sign that there was something special about that team. He’s not the first name that pops to mind when you think of the Oilers’ dynasty, but he was an important part.

He was even a Canuck for a few days in 1996, though he was claimed by the Oilers on waivers.

While I’d love to see the Canucks lift the cup, and in a lot of ways I think there’s certainly a segment of the Canuck fans that deserve to see their team win, I have to admit I’ll never love them as much as I love the Oilers. They’ll never be as good as the team I grew up with, though let’s be honest the Oilers will never be that good either.

I was talking with a few people the other day about how Vancouverites, and we included ourselves in that category, always get excited when we get a mention outside of Canada.  Especially when Americans even acknowledge our existence it sends us into twitters of excitement. 

Maybe it’s just our Canadian inferiority complex, or maybe it’s just we’re kind of vain and self-absorbed.  I can’t imagine New Yorkers being excited about having their city mentioned in a CBC show, but boy was I excited when the Vancouver Canucks and their ‘95 playoff run got an extended mention on the show How I Met Your Mother last week [stc].

It’s certainly probably one of the best Canadian references, aside from The Simpsons‘ nearly constant jabs at our country or Jon Stewart calling the Conservative Party the equivalent of the American “Gay Nader Lovers For Peace Party”. 

What’s your favorite Canada, or Vancouver, reference on American or European media?  The Lumberjack sketch comes to mind.

Happy players at the end of the game, originally uploaded by Stina Magga.

Vancouver – Metroblogging News Service

The Vancouver Canucks last night became the first team to win the Stanley Cup, one game into the National Hockey League season, after smashing the Calgary Flames at home by a score of 6-0. The victory was so decisive that league Commissioner Gary Bettman felt that playing the remaining 81 games of the regular season, and the playoffs was pointless.

“Having reviewed the tapes of the season starting games it’s clear that there is no other team that could compete with the Canucks on the ice,” Bettman said in a press conference this morning where the coveted cup was awarded by podcast recorded from Toronto.

Bettman pointed out that the Canucks have always enjoyed strong season ticket sales, and after years of suffering with little to no playoff success the league felt it was time that the Vancouver fans were honoured for their bandwagon jumping.

Some hockey commentators have argued that there is more behind the league’s decision than one strong on-ice showing. The rumour is that the awarding of the league title is a signal to other teams to follow the board room examples of the Vancouver club.

“We’re seeing a lot of teams with a great deal of debt,” pointed out CBC commentator Ron McLean, “with the credit crisis building in the states there’s a good chance that we’ll see the league losing a lot of the newer expansion teams. To shore up support for one of the bed rock Canadian franchises, and to reward the fiscal suaveness of the Canucks the league decided to award the cup.”

McLean’s co-commentator Don Cherry disagreed, “They’ve got the most Europeans. They’ve got twins. That’s some kind of Swedish wet dream. You know what the Swedes make good, cheap futon frames that you can assemble at home, not hockey players. Hockey is Canadian like beer and repressed emotions leading to domestic violence.  This Stanley Cup heist by the league is just the latest in Euro-coddling.  First they make the boys wear helmets, and you know good old boys from Kingston don’t play with helmets.  Then they make them use these fibershade metal sticks and now this, all because someone in Zurich wanted it.”

Liberal Member of Parliament and former NHL goaltender Ken Dryden agreed that the economy was the main motivating factor.

“The Canucks are masters at this game, and the rest of the league need to learn from them. The team did not even appear to be trying last season, and yet they sold out each and every game. They made millions releasing a new jersey, that continued the franchise’s history of having the ugliest shirt in the NHL and they’re going to do it again this year.”

“That sort of marketing is diabolical, and it’s the sort of thing that teams in Arizona, Florida and other parts of the lower states will need to learn from,” Dryden said.

Bettman stands by the league’s decision, “This isn’t just an award for selling the most prawn sandwiches to the luxury box crowd, it’s based on a dominating performance of hockey in the first game of the season.”

What will happen to the rest this season’s games has yet to been decided. For now they will continue while the league owners debate whether or not to award a second Stanley Cup. The City of Vancouver is making plans to hold the parade/riot to celebrate the victory. Local officials suggest that it will be held in conjunction with the Rogers Santa Clause Parade.

Johnny Canuck, originally uploaded by miss604.

Over the past few years the Canucks have been using the slogan “We Are All Canucks”. Now I think we all understood that meant that each and every Vancouverite was a part of the Canucks “team”. You know the part of the team that has to pay to go to the games, and that the rest of the team likes to play pranks on such as tricking us into buying a new jersey every year [kk].

We’re kind of treated like the kid who shows up to Little League Baseball wearing a football helmet for extra protection.

The thing is though I think we’ve been reading the slogan wrong. I think over the past few years the Canucks have just been softening us up, preparing us for their real plan. First they hired a rookie GM, then they let Marcus Naslund go without even trying to resign him while making wild claims about signing Sundin and then they became the first team to name a goaltender a captain since 1948 despite an NHL rule against the practice.

Don’t you see the next step here? The next stage in this plan to revolutionize the National Hockey League, the sport of hockey and even sport itself?

Right now regular Canucks fans appear in ads alongside the team. The thing is though hockey players are expensive. They want millions of dollars to play a sport that most people who play actually have to pay to. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

We are all Canucks, because soon we’ll all be playing for the Canucks. Show up on game night with goalie equipment and you can play between the pipes. Have a pair of skates that fit you and were bought in the last six years? You’re a winger. And we’d pay for the privilage wouldn’t we. How much do you think the Canucks could auction off the right to take a face off against Sydney Crosby?

Kid with the football helmet, it’s your turn at bat.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t think the Canucks have been making very good decisions lately. The off-season has had the sort of amateur blunders that make Newcastle United look like a properly organized football team. But that’s enough mixing sports, we’re here to talk about hockey and the Vancouver Canucks and how they’ve just gone an appointed goaltender Roberto Luongo as their captain.

Now of course there’s a rule against a goaltender being a captain in the NHL [wp] that’s based on that fact that since the primary on-ice role of the captain is to act as a liaison between the team and the officials during the game, and that it would be too time consuming for a goalie to rush out of his net to argue with the referee every time he wanted to argue said ref’s decision. So Luongo won’t technically be the captain, he won’t wear the ‘C’ or take part in any official face-offs say if the Queen were to stop by to drop the puck.

At least unless the team has gone far more loopy than we all thought.

Unless they’re all on wacky pills at GM Place, and really it’s too early in the reason to call that one, the Canucks simply recognized as a team leader. He’ll be in charge of being the team’s dressing room leader, be responsible to organizing team social events and act as the representative between the team and the community.

So he’ll be doing fun runs and posing for pictures with babies.

He’ll also be the first one handed the Stanley Cup when his team wins it. That team won’t be the Canucks of course, but who knows where he’ll end up after this.

Vancouver has of course a lot of experience with an un-official Captain, since let’s face it the team never did the right thing to honour Trevor Linden with the ‘C’ after his return despite the fact that from most accounts he was the on and off ice leader during the end of last season.

But enough about the past. It’s time to be optimistic, and because of this decision I’m in a mood to upgrade my season prediction from missing the playoffs to almost making the playoffs. Now that’s what you call leadership.

Update: The CBC say everything I do with half the words and a third the venom [cbc].

Let’s face it this year has the potential to be a horrible hockey year for Vancouver. Pick up tickets to the WHL Giants because the Canucks have all the markings of a disaster about them as the year is about to begin. Making the playoffs will be unlikely in a competitive Western Conference where every team has strengthened while the Canucks have been throwing talent overboard as if hoping to right a sinking ship. The off-season has been a farce and there’s nothing to suggest that’s about to change.

How bad is it? You’ll find out after the jump.

An off-season to forget

Appointing a rookie General Manager sounds kind of dumb for a team that’s meant to be a Stanley Cup contender, but that sort of limited ambition is what Vancouver fans should have come to expect. Nobody is aiming to win, they’re just aiming not to come in last. The appointment of Mike Gillis made a little more sense when you consider that he was the Canucks star player Marcus Naslund’s agent prior to that. Obviously keeping Canucks captain Naslund was important, especially given the retirement of the team’s other leader Trevor Linden had retired. Too bad then that they didn’t even offer him a new contract.

Instead of resigning Naslund Gillis made a big deal about how the Canucks were about to sign Mats Sundin, allowing Naslund to sign for the New York Rangers. Of course talking with Sundin before talking with the press about how he was about to arrive in Vancouver might have been a good idea, because Sundin seemed surprised to learn that he had already signed with Vancouver. Sundin isn’t coming, and even if he was it’s not 1997 so I’m not sure why we wanted him.

It’s also not 2002, and so the arrival of Pavol Demitra isn’t exactly reassuring.

The Good News

I don’t want you to think it’s all bad. Okay it’s mostly bad, but even the darkest clouds have silver somewhere hidden in them. I mean if you’re going to trust cliches they do. As long as the team gives 110% every game and sticks to playing the fundamentals.

Wait… sorry I was channeling The Province.

Basically the good news is that Roberto Luongo is still a Canuck. 2007’s Hart Trophy (League MVP) runner up belongs at a better team. The Canucks will win games they’ve got no business winning because he’s in the net, and if someone could build a time machine and shoot him back in time to any of the number of years when we had Dan Cloutier in net for the playoffs the Canucks would have a few Stanley Cup banners hanging from the rafters.

The trouble was he was not enough to drag the team into the playoffs last year, and with an overall weaker team he probably won’t be able to do it this year either. Luongo’s a motivated player, and last year when it was clear that none of the team could be arsed to even try, save for Luongo and Linden, there were definite questions as to whether he would stay in Vancouver.

The overall

Being complete shit has become too comfortable to the Canucks, and as an organization they don’t look like they’re willing to change things. Instead of bringing in a top level manager to sort things out they brought in a novice and then let Steve Tambelini go to Edmonton to be the General Manager there. No matter how bad the team plays they will sell out every game, sell jerseys and baseball caps. It’s Vancouver, it’s Canada and the fact is we’re happy to accept performances that would never get a pass in cities like Toronto, Edmonton and Montreal.

In an American city where hockey plays third fiddle to football and baseball and the team owners can’t count on the team selling out every home game, being so complacent would mean the death of a franchise. The Canucks will survive, but it’s going to be a long season.

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].  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.

It’s the turn of the century.  We’re all worried about whether or not our computers are about to crash and making jokes about “Hanging Chads” when known idiot George W. Bush wins the US Presidential Election to become the actual President of the US of A.  Thankfully as we all know it’s not like he’s going to be called onto handle a crisis or make any real decisions, right?

They year 2000  was a great year for Mats Sundin, the sort of year that any team in the NHL would have been wise to sign him to a lucrative contract and build a team around him.  A franchise player he’d have really been a big score for the Canucks to sign in the year 2000.

So it’s sort of a hilarious turn of events that eight years later, at the age of 37, he turned down a big money offer from the Canucks [vs].   That doesn’t mean it couldn’t possibly happen, but then why exactly would we want it to?  Didn’t we learn from the Mark Messier thing that bringing in a big money player in the latter stages of his career and trying to shape the team around him, only leads to pain and sadness?

I suppose they figure with Mike Gillis at the helm and pain and sadness 100% guaranteed, we might as well get a big name signing in to sell some jerseys.  Face it, it was either that or redesign the uniform again.

How far have the Canucks slipped though?  This should be a great market to play in.  We’ve got weather, a strong dollar, a rather casual attitude towards celebrity that allows players to live more anonymously than in other Canadian markets and a fan-base that doesn’t expect anything except for pain and sadness.  It seems like the perfect destination.

Maybe if we offer him a carbon tax credit.

Update: Oh hey and now we lost Nausland [vc].  Wasn’t the the point of appointing his agent as our GM, to keep him?  Well at least there’s the Vancouver Giants.