We currently don’t have cable. I’ve been putting the decision off to the fall, when I’d judge how much I was missing regularly watching the Canucks. At the moment, I’m thinking Shaw will go without our $50/month. It’s hard to be hopeful at the moment
He was inactive on draft day, but I was willing to give new Canucks GM Mike Gillis the benefit of the doubt. Then he turns around and offers a Mats Sundin an absurd amount of money–at least $3 million over market value (it feels to me like Sundin is done with the NHL). And before that he makes a cheap, ineffectual play for a restricted free agent.
In short, unless Mr. Gillis has some brilliant strategy that none of us can see (and that’s definitely a possibility), it’s going to be a rough year at GM Place.
That’s no big deal. The team has been quite good for nearly a decade, and you can’t go to the playoffs every year. The organization ought to embrace the idea that this is a rebuilding year. They should give as many young players as much playing time as possible, and try to trade some veteran assets while they’re still desirable. Roberto Luongo isn’t going to win a cup in this town in the next two years, and he could bring serious value in a trade.
The Canucks likely won’t make such changes in 2008, but assuming the team tanks, look for a fire sale on veterans at the trading deadline next spring. And I think that would be terrific. The current crop of players was good, but rarely great.
I didn’t hear until late last night (ferry trip plus Mark Knopfler concert kept me away from sports news), but yesterday longtime Canuck Markus Naslund signed a two-year deal with the New York Rangers for what works out to $4 million a year:
“It wasn’t hard to keep playing because I knew a few weeks after the season I wanted the chance to play again and maybe redeem myself and play the way I know I can play,” Naslund said last night from his home in Ornskoldsvik.
I’m glad to see the backside of Naslund (as, I’m sure, were many Vancouverites when he was walking around town). Don’t get me wrong–he could play. In his prime he had a Brett Hullesque release from the slot, cunning hands around the net and terrific outside speed. Also like Hull, he has that ability to sneak into the bare patches of defensive coverage to make room for a shot. He had three forty-goal seasons here in Vancouver, and was obviously a key component to the team’s success during his tenure. For a couple years, the West Coast Express line of Naslund, Morrison and Bertuzzi was the best in the league.
Still, his production has been systematically tailing off in recent years. He may enjoy a boost with a more attacking-style team and a more capable centre, but that was never going to happen in Vancouver. The team hasn’t had the personnel for the past two or three years. Last year the Canucks paid Naslund $6 million for 25 goals from Naslund last year, which was about 15 goals too few.
Naslund was never the kind of player I really admired. His commitment to defense was, at best, spotty and he was reasonably timid on the ice. Mike Keenan’s decision to hand Naslund the captaincy after Messier left was a brilliant tactical decision, but I think its effectiveness has long been exhausted. Naslund always struck me as too cool to be captain. It was hard to imagine him getting angry at his teammates for underperforming, or standing up for them physically on the ice.
It’s a common pattern as players age: they don’t necessarily want to decline in the same city where they rose to prominence. I’ve enjoyed watching Naslund over the years in Vancouver, but his expiry date had, for me, already passed.
If I have the Swedish correct, the title of this post means “we’ll miss you, Naslund”, “I love you, Markus”. Cue the cheesy tribute video:
Via John on Twitter, I just heard an unconfirmed report that Vancouver Canucks prospect Luc Bourdon had been killed in a motorcycle accident. There are no details at the moment, but I’ll update this post as soon as I turn some up.
As I write this, John points to Kukla’s Korner, which has a translation of a French media report. He apparently died near Shipagan, New Brunswick.
I watched Bourdon play at the World Juniors in 2006, and he was excellent. Condolences to his family.
UPDATE #2: Somebody came by saying that she was friend of Bourdon’s and left a comment. For what it’s worth, her IP address checks out:
Hi, i’m from Shippagan and i’ve known Luc since i was in kintergarden. Luc was just passing his girlfriend and it was really windy and his coat got stock or something and he lost control of his bike and got hitted by a tractor-trailer. His girlfriend has seen everything. We are all with the family and with Charlyne, his girlfriend.
xxxxx R.I.P Bourdon
Who is Fabian Brunnström? With a name like that, I wondered if maybe he won the latest edition of Swedish Idol. In fact, he’s an undrafted forward (listed as a left-winger here) in the Swedish Elite League, and allegedly one of the best hockey players outside the NHL.
Yesterday, the CBC reported that the Canucks were close to signing Brunnström. From Scott Morrison’s blog:
No fewer than 20 NHL teams expressed interest in the 23-year-old Swedish winger, who went undrafted and played the past season in the Swedish Elite League with Farjestad.
As reported on Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday, Brunnstrom had a short list of five or six and further reduced that to one: the Canucks, whose general manager, Dave Nonis, did a good job of selling the youngster on the team and the city.
On the broadcast, Morrison calls Brunnström “the hottest player not in the NHL right now” and “speedy”. Here’s an earlier article from The Hockey News:
Brunnstrom, a 6-foot-1, 195-pound forward, is a classic late bloomer. Last season he was playing First Division in Sweden, which is two steps under the Elite League and was a star at that level, which prompted Farjestad to sign him this season. He skates very well and his three goals and 13 points in 21 games are probably not a clear indication of how good he is offensively.
Why wouldn’t he come to Vancouver? Canada is considerably more similar to Sweden than the US, it’s got the most favourable climate in the country and the Canucks are chock full of Swedes. I assume that the team has some kind of Swedish quota, and the Canucks are signing Brunnström anticipating Naslund’s forthcoming departure. Darren Dreger speculates that he might sign at $2 million per season.
If the Canucks do sign him, Brunnström will undoubtedly get a long audition with the Sedin twins. They’ve been missing an effective triplet since Anson Carter was stricken with delusions of grandeur. Who knows? Maybe he’ll fit in where everybody else on the roster hasn’t. I’ll also be pleased to see the team get younger.
Here’s a little video compilation of in action:
He’s wearing a #96 jersey. If he does play for the Canucks, he’ll have to decide whether he wants the monkey that comes free with that number on his back. When a team has a bad year, there’s often extra pressure on signings like this. Hopefully he can shoulder it.
I can map my serious interest in the Canucks to Trevor Linden’s career. Growing up, I always kind of followed the team, but I didn’t get seriously interested until my teens, about when Linden entered the league. I don’t really remember his first game or anything, but I do recall the city being abuzz about this 18-year-old, drafted second over all behind Mike Modano. Modano scored more goals over the years, but I’m glad the team got Linden (that was a good draft year–four five great players in the top ten picks).
Like so many Vancouverites, Linden became my favourite player. I liked his intensity, his tenacity and his endless willingness to do the hard work on the ice. He was never the fastest skater, but I did like the little hitching half-step he took with his first stride. Especially in the early years, he wore his heart on his sleeve. Nobody seemed to feel a defeat more dearly in the media scrum following a game. I remember 1994 with fondness, how he put the team on his back against the Rangers and almost carried them to the promise land of the Stanley Cup.
Wayne Gretzky said that the legs are the first thing to go, and you could see Linden slowing down in recent years. He deserves a break. He’s sweated blood in the NHL for nineteen years. I hope the organization will find a spot for him if he wants it. And as Rebecca suggests, I hope they name a street after him. Sign the petition if you hope so, too.
With their loss to the Edmonton Oilers, the Canucks are out of the playoffs. Maybe the Sedin twins can make a foursome with Roloson and Hemsky and hit the links.
James said it best the other day: “the current crop of Canucks are like middling students–they just do enough to get by”.That ‘just enough’, unfortunately, wasn’t enough to get them into the playoffs. Who or what is to blame? I’m only a semi-serious fan and I only watched the last twenty games this season, but here’s what I figure:
Markus Naslund - If you’re earning $6 million, you’d better lead the team in a category other than Handsomest Swede. His 25 goals and 30 assists weren’t nearly enough. His -4 in +/- doesn’t look good either. This is more speculative, but I never liked Naslund as team captain. He seems to lack the intensity that captains of more successful teams seem to have. He seems to shy away from contact, and he’s not exactly renowned for his back-check.
Lack of scoring - The team has only three 20-goal scorers, and Daniel Sedin led the team with 29. They lost too many games 2-1 or 3-2. Would a major deadline deal have made a difference? I’m not sure, but I wish they’d rolled the dice.
Injuries - The team lost a lot of man-games to injury, and their defence was decimated for most of the season. A couple of playoff-bound teams have lost more, but it was certainly a factor.
Tough division - The Northwest division is the most competitive in the NHL. Teams play 32 games against their divisional opponents, and none of them are easy for the Canucks. Unfortunately, that’s not going to change.
Is there reason to be hopeful for next season? Hard to say, but here’s what I like about the team:
The Sedins - They seem to have plateaued at good instead of great, but they’re very effective and scoring at nearly a point-a-game.
Ryan Kesler - Teams kill for this kind of two-way, fleet-footed player who can hit, kill penalties and score 20 goals a season.
Roberto Luongo - Still under contract. Huzzah.
A Promising Youth Movement - Edler, Bourdon, Burrows Raymond and Shannon look reasonably ready for regular NHL duty. I don’t know how close Grabner, Schneider and Hansen are, but I can’t remember the last time the Canucks had so many promising young players in their system. I like GM Dave Nonis should move some young assets for scoring help over the summer.
$9 Million To Spend - The team will hopefully bid farewell to Naslund and Brendan Morrison. That frees up some cash to go after some free agents.
A New Captain - The team needs a change of attitude. With Naslund leaving, I hope they hand the ‘C’ to Willie Mitchell.
What team will I be cheering for in the post-season now that Vancouver is out of the running? I cheer for Canadian teams first, and Calgary last among the Canadian teams. So, then, go, Sens, go.
UPDATE: James Mirtle has a thoughtful and, to my mind, accurate review of the Canucks’ middling season. Best quote: “They couldn’t score last year — at home, on the road, during the season, in the playoffs, not in a box, not with a fox.”
UPDATE #2: Washington, now there’s a team with character. They’ve gone 9-1 in the last ten games to demand a spot in the post-season. They still need some help to get in, but I hope they make it. They deserve it, and I want to watch Ovechkin tear things up.
Every year at the NHL trade deadline, I get excited. And every year, I’m disappointed. It’s 20 minutes past the noon PST deadline, and the only deal the Canucks have made is this one:
Matt Cooke for Matt Pettinger
There’s still time to announce a splashy deal, and I hope I’m wrong, but whiskey tango foxtrot, Dave Nonis? Have you not been paying attention to your team this season?
What’s the knock against the current version of the Canucks? They can’t score enough goals. They couldn’t do it last season, and they can’t do it this season. Of the teams currently in the playoffs, they are among the lowest in team scoring.
So what does GM Dave Nonis do? He subtracts five goals from the team. Cooke has scored seven thus far this season, and Pettinger has scored two. There were plenty of scorers on the table, and he hasn’t landed any of them.
We’ve heard the excuses year after year: the price is too high, he doesn’t want to mortgage the team’s future, deadline trades rarely have impact and so forth. Bollocks, I say, and here’s why:
Sooner or later, you’ve got to take a chance and roll the dice.
Any team that has Roberto Luongo always has a chance in the post-season.
A trade is an important gesture to the team and the fans–it’s a tactical demonstration of dedication to improvement. The team is in good shape financially, so maybe they’re under-motivated to improve?
I don’t pretend to be a hockey genius, and I know about 5% of what Nonis knows about his industry. Still, as a fan, I’m tired of being consistently disappointed at the deadline.
I hope I’m wrong, and that the Canucks announce a deal in the next hour or two. Heck, Olli Jokinen hasn’t left Florida yet. I fear, however, that the team will suffer another early departure from the playoffs after a lot of 2-1 losses.
That said, I am happy to see the end of Matt Cooke. He’s been overpaid and keeping a roster spot from a younger player for years.
When website managers first discovered RSS, back in 2003 or so, feeds were often published like this:
That’s from the Canucks site. They list these two feeds on their RSS page, with no explanation of what each one contains. Which feed do I want? Is one the subset of another? Does the result of each game qualify as a ‘top story’ or plain old ‘news’?
I was guilty of something similar in 2003, when I still worked for the Man. I don’t think we were very thoughtful about how we split up our news (we had a press release feed and a corporate news feed or some bollocks).
But we’ve had five years to learn, and it’s not brain surgery. Provide one feed with everything in it, and then slice out a few feeds in ways that people might actually want to use them: game highlights, off-ice team news, corporate updates, and so forth.
For the past decade or so, I’ve made a habit of watching hockey highlights on television. I began with the sadly-defunct SportsPage (a triple-A show for much of the Canadian broadcast talent you see on the CBC, SportsNet and TSN), and subsequently watched TSN or SportsNet.
During the winter, these shows almost always open with hockey highlights, so I’d sit down at 23:00 and be done by 23:15 at the latest.
Living in Malta, there’s obviously no Canadian highlights shows on TV. Plus, we don’t have a TV. So, as I mentioned a few weeks back, I’ve been watching highlights on the web (the CBC, mostly).
This has resulted in one subtle shift in my viewing. Instead of sitting back and watching the highlights from all the games played, I must now pick which clips I want to view. What’s the result?
Surprisingly, I watch far fewer highlights. I always check out the Canucks, obviously, but after that I’m kind of left staring at the other results and wondering which I should choose. I lean toward the Canucks’ divisional rivals and Canadian teams, I guess. Plus I’ve been watching a lot of Penguins and Blackhawks highlights, because they have the most exciting young players in the league.
Part of my problem, I suppose, is that I don’t know which highlights are worth watching–besides the score, there’s no metadata. I can’t tell which games went to overtime, or to a shootout, or which featured a fantastic goal or save.
Here’s a feature request for CBC Sports: add rating functionality to each video clip, enabling viewers to judge each clip. That would help me assess which highlights I ought to watch, and which I can give a miss.
What’s the big lesson? Well, there’s isn’t one. What’s the small lesson? A reminder about mediums and messages, and how moving video from the TV to the web inevitably changes our relationship to it.
Having spent the start of the hockey season in Malta, I regularly want to watch NHL (and in particular, Canucks) highlights online. This proved surprisingly challenging. I’ve made a lengthy survey of the alternatives, and here’s what I came up with. I have a relatively slow Web connection here in Malta, and I’m running a MacBook with AdBlock Plus, which can play havoc with Flash-based videos.
Fox Sports - Decent Flash-based videos, though they’re in a popup window and you have to filter for ‘NHL’ before you can see any. They provide short clips and they only seem to cover the American teams. Grade: B-
ESPN - Again, decent Flash player but they only cover American teams and their videos often aren’t up to date. It’s December 3rd today, and they haven’t posted video from yesterday’s games. Also, the clips are on the short side. Grade: C+
TSN - It could just be my connection speed, but this site takes an eternity to load, and performs very poorly in Firefox and Safari on the Mac. The video itself is good, but getting there is too much trouble. Grade: D
SportsNet - The videos simply won’t play on my Mac, in either Safari or Firefox. Under the blank video window I see the message “Flash is required for Sportsnet.ca video.” I obviously have Flash installed, so I don’t know what’s up. Grade: F
CBC Sports - I’ve been watching these for a while, and they’re quite good. Yes, it’s an irksome pop-up window, but the Flash app is very fast, easy to use and the videos are lengthy and well-edited. Grade: A-
NHL.com - It took me a while to find these videos, because a search for “NHL.com video” indicated that their latest video was from 2004. These guys are the winners. They have a fast Flash-based player, the longest highlights packages, and you can choose individual clips–goals, saves, hits and other incidents–from the game summary. Grade: A
My universal complaint about these video sites and micro-sites is that they always disclose the scores before you watch the package. I prefer to watch the highlights with the outcome in doubt. I ought to be able to click a button to hide the scores in the web app.
We currently don’t have cable. I’ve been putting the decision off to the fall, when I’d judge how much I was missing regularly watching the Canucks. At the moment, I’m thinking Shaw will go without our $50/month. It’s hard to be hopeful at the moment
