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.

There’s a few things that I’m tired of hearing about around town. Be warned these five things are on notice.

5) The Hollow Tree in Stanley Park [gm]:  It’s a tree, it was killed by God.  That’s the way nature works.  If it was torn down to put up a Starbucks, yeah then we can have some sort of fit about that.  It’s not a metaphor, it’s a damn tree.  Get over it.

4) The dollar: I get it, it’s crazy that our dollar is so strong against the American one.  Yet it’s been like that for months now.  You can also add any story about how Product X is so much cheaper in the US now because of the dollars’ values.  We all get it.  It’s boring now.

3) The Canucks: Let’s just ignore the losers and hopefully they’ll all return to Sweden and never come back.  Instead let’s talk about (soon-to-be) former Canuck Trevor Linden [bb] whose far more interesting.  Though keep it to a minimum, he’s getting pretty close to going on the list to.  Remember he’s a hockey player, he only walks on frozen water.  For a team that actually wins something try the Whitecaps [wcfc].

2) How the Olympics are destroying everything: People were homeless before we won the Olympics and they’d still be homeless afterwards.  Let’s be honest we as a society don’t give a shit about the problem of the homeless, and if 2010 was not going to be in Vancouver all the money spent on the Olympics would not instead have been used to feed and clothe those who need it.  The money probably would have been spent on magic beans, ferries that we’ll never use or a space program.  The Olympics make an easy target because it’s billions spent on things like watching men in superhero costumes slide down a frozen tube in a piece of fiberglass, but they’re nowhere near the root cause of the problem.  Show some intelligence and try to find that root instead of just raging against the wrong machine.

1) How the Olympics are really going to revitalize the city:  Right because the thing holding back Richmond from becoming a world class suburb was the fact that it didn’t have a giant speed skating rink. 

If you’ve been living in a cave, or only watching American television, for the last week you know that the Canucks are now out of the playoffs. Another year of dashed hopes and spoiled dreams, and it’s time to start talking about what needs to be done for next year [cbc].

Brendan Morrison and Markus Naslund are both free agents. Trevor Linden is most likely leaving, or if he stays will be little more than a totem on the bench having long past the days when he could drive the team game after game. Roberto Luongo fled town as soon as he could, one of the few players to do the jersey any credit this year.

So what’s the blogosphere say? Find out after the jump.

- Miss 604 was at the last game of the season where the team really showed their heart by giving up and letting Calgary trounce them by 7-1 [m604]. At least Trevor Linden tried, and got feted by the assembled fans.

- Beyond Robson asks the reasonable question “What happened?” [br]. Their answer is good.

- The Canucks Official Fan Blogs have been silent since March with few exceptions, and as you’d guess they’ve been fairly easy going on the team. Mike The Yankee takes the reasonable approach of looking at the cloud’s silver lining [cb]. By that I mean he’s insane, the fact that the team barely missed the playoffs is not a silver lining. This is a team that should have been competing for top in the division, not first amongst the losers. Still if Bush could roll out the Mission Accomplished banner so early in Iraq, I suppose we can start calling the season a success.

- Matthew Good [mg] posted that Vancouver never has really been a hockey town, and that the team needed to rebuild around Luongo. For that he got his mailbox flooded with letters from Canucks fans, until he finally took down the post.

I’ve been receiving a ton of email from Canucks fans lambasting me for everything from my lack of knowledge to the fact that ‘my music sucks’. Normally that wouldn’t bother me too much, but when you start to get emails that claim that Rolling Stone voted you the worst song writer in North America, which is a total fabrication, then you know you’re in for a shit storm that’s best avoided.

- The Blog According to Buzz has a fairly humorous new logo for the Canucks [bab].

- Michael Klassen believes that the Canucks won’t ever win the Stanley Cup, and it’s all your fault [mk].