View from the Orca's eyes: An alternative history of the NHL and why the Canucks are due

[OldFaithfulcap]

I've had this idea for a while, sometimes I think about extending it and editing it fully and seeing if any other website would pick it up but decided to put it here tonight

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

View from the Orca's eyes: An alternative history of the NHL and why the Canucks are due

 

The NHL like all good sports league carefully crafts its own story. From the Original Six to Wayne Gretzky, the narrative comes out about the stars who won the Stanley Cup and the next generation of stars like Connor McDavid and Nathan Mackinnon. Turn on a US broadcast and you’ll see Mr Leadership award Mark Messier talk about his glory days and some throwback reference to Cup winners like the 80s Islanders, Edmonton or Chicago. But not all stories get told.

Vancouver is one of the world’s most beautiful cities. It sits beneath the Coast Mountains; it breathes the soft arboreal air of the magnificent Stanley Park and its province extends throughout unceded lands across modern day British Columbia. It stands watch over the deep and vast Pacific Ocean, a space so vast it connects the north-west of Canada to distant cities like Tokyo, Sydney and Honolulu.  

 

The Vancouver Canucks joined the league in 1970-71. The team has never settled on a jersey colour for long, moving from the original blue “stick in rink” to the overly vibrant yellow Vs to the black with flying spaghetti skate. The team’s current logo is the Orca, born in the 90s and slightly adjusted ever since. Orcas are a fun logo like the Canuck’s mascot Finn. Their shape lends itself to cute plush toys and they became a justifiable cause to free them from ocean park captivities. Of course, Orcas are also the apex predator of the ocean, able to flip and kill a great white shark with ease and smart enough to hunt whales with sailors in the 1800s. People only seem to pay attention to them when they are doing something like attacking boats in the Mediterranean, which is an apt metaphor for the Canucks.

 

In a post-truth world people still benefit from hearing another perspective and so non-Canuck fans read on and perhaps you’ll understand the world from a Canucks’ view.

 

The surrender gesture of victory

 

The 1981-82 Canucks did not start the season well. They struggled through, losing their coach to suspension toward the end of the season. Their coach Harry Neale was suspended 6 regular season games and 4 postseason games for going into the stands seeking retribution against a fan who had punched one of his players Tiger Williams (who may have done more damage). Their 30-33-17 record qualified them for the playoffs and assistant Roger Neilson bonded the team together and they won the first two playoff rounds. In game 2 versus Chicago, the referee Bob Myers overturned a Canucks goal and handed the BlackHawks some questionable penalties. After the last penalty gave the Blackhawks a 4-1 lead, Neilson placed a white towel on a hockey stick in mock surrender. He and some fellow players who joined in were elected from the game.

Neilson’s act was followed by 3 wins, driven on by a legion of Canucks fans who brought white towels to the game and for the first time in their history they made the Stanley Cup Finals, where unfortunately the New York Islanders swept them.

 

The towels continue to this day. What kind of team turns a gesture of surrender, a defiant act against the officials into a cherished centerpiece of their history? The Canucks do.

 

Messier the villain

 

While Canadians are stereotypically forgiving in nature, a Canuck fans never forgets. Jim Robson’s “he will play, you know he’ll play. He’ll play on crutches.” is a rallying cry for any Canuck fan to carry on. The call accompanied the end of Game 6 of the 1993-94 finals where the Canucks captain, Trevor Linden was repeatedly and illegally crosschecked to the ice by Mark Messier. The unpenalized act and memories of a shot off a crossbar in Game 7 doomed perhaps the most talented Canucks squad (with the most famous Canucks 90s forward Pavel Bure) to another Stanley Cup loss.

 

While Canucks fans disliked Messier for this and bear teeth at every single New York Rangers Cup reference they really despised what came after. 3 seasons after that loss, the Canucks brought on the coach of that New York Rangers team, Mike Keenan who signed Messier and was given the Captaincy from Linden (who was even worse traded). That Canucks team was loaded with talent but they did not gel under a less interested Messier and the core of that squad was moved on after the 1999-00 season. To name a leadership award after Messier is another slight to a fanbase where he failed to achieve anything.

 

The price of revenge

 

While I rely on the experiences and written accounts of vintage fans for the past two eras, I was smack bang in this one in 2004. The Canucks Captain that season was Markus Naslund who was an extremely skilled and perfectly gentlemanly player, a Roger Federer type if I was to make a general comparison. Now you don’t need to understand hockey to know there have always been skilled players, grinders and fighters and you don’t need to understand the hockey code to realize that a cheap shot from a grinder, a rookie no less, on a player who had scored the second most goals a season earlier (48) is going to make players and fans mad. And mad the Canucks team and fans were, for on February 16,  Steve Moore a rookie grinder on Colorado elbowed the Canucks captain in the head while both players were going for a loose puck. Naslund missed games and while the next Canucks-Avs meeting had no incidents (with the NHL commissioner watching), the next Vancouver home game on March 8 started the cry for revenge.

I was at the game wearing my red alternate Orca Bertuzzi jersey. The crowd buzzed and waited. Matt Cooke, a smallish pest who was not a fighter, challenged Moore and the meek fight did nothing. The game was an awful blowout by the Avalanche but the Canucks fans cheered every hit and as the game hit the 3^rd period the scent of bloodlust remained. I remember watching a shift where Moore was briefly entangled with Naslund and then I saw Bertuzzi make a move for him, shouting at the rookie. It wasn’t all in the one motion (I think the puck went into the Colorado zone and then came up the ice) but then in a moment of madness Bertuzzi punched Moore from behind and a number of players jumped on top. The crowd cheered wildly, driven by revenge and as they carted Moore off the ice I remember the jumbotron showing the bloody patch of ice which brought further cheers from the crowd. At the time I was a big fan of revenge and was happy I had seen it. With years of hindsight, the extent of Moore’s injury and the impact on Bertuzzi and Vancouver I have certainly softened and wished Bertuzzi had crushed Moore with one of his hits or at least fought him face to face. That being said, the hit on Naslund still makes me angry.

 

The bullies win

 

Boston isn’t known for good sportsmanship. It’s known for hard teams who play dirty and who have success. In 2010-11 the stars seemed to align for Vancouver. Led by the nice Sedin twins (who played much like Naslund and were gentlemen), goaltender Roberto Luongo, and their less gentlemanly players like Alex Burrows, Ryan Kesler and Kevin Bieksa they beat their Western conference finals and made the Stanley Cup Finals.

 

Boston was a grittier larger team from the get go. This was apparent early. The Canucks tried to respond in kind but one of their hits by Aaron Rome earned the Canucks player a 4-game suspension. A week later one of the Canucks skilled players, Mason Raymond was badly injured when rammed into the boards by a Boston defencemen, Johnny Boychuk. He suffered a spinal injury and was out the rest of the playoffs - there was no suspension for Boychuk. The Canucks were outmuscled and Luongo outplayed during the finals there is no doubt, but the narrative quickly became how the Canucks were pests and dirty and this still gets rolled out. There’s no mention of Boston being the bullies, rarely much press given to the Boston goalie’s dismissal of Obama by not going to the white house. The last remaining player on that Boston team, the now captain Brad Marchand, remains the most disliked player by everyone outside of Beantown and has consistently avoided suspensions for borderline play. It’s one thing to lose to a dirty team, it’s quite unfair to have the villains rewritten as the heroes.

 

The coach fiasco

 

The Canucks had a lovable coach named Bruce Boudreau. Great guy, his teams did very well in the regular season but they had faltered in the playoffs. The Canucks were struggling badly in 2022-23 and a large part of it was because the Canucks GM did not see Bruce as the future of the team. This was badly handled as everyone knew Bruce was on borrowed time and had a decimated and woeful blueline and lower lines and no goalie depth due to injury. The Canucks became the laughing stock of the league as the bruce saga dragged on, JT Miller was scapegoated as showing no effort on Hockey Night in Canada and finally Bruce was replaced by the Canuck’s favoured coach Tocchet. It certainly was badly handled and when the team started winning and reducing its odds of drafting local junior hero Connor Bedard the fanbase again groaned at pointless wins.

 

The now

 

Vancouver in 2023-24 won the Pacific Division for the first time, finishing 6^th overall. The structure of Tocchet and free agent work has enabled them to have an amazing regular season, where they made history via players hitting career milestones (Brock Boeser 40 goals, JT Miller 100, Quinn Hughes 92 points) and team efforts (winning all games on the New York road trip for the first time ever). They were barely favoured to win their first round around Nashville and were no-one’s pick to advance to the finals. As of this writing, they lead Nashville 3-1 and few scribes think they’ll win the series. 

 

Update: They defeated Nashville and then had one of 33 experts pick them to win. They have trailed in the series but after a game 6 loss and the loss of their top scorer everyone is writing them off. 

 

Flipping the script

 

In planning on writing this I’ve come to realize two things. Firstly, few other hockey fans or non-fans have any idea about the history of being a Canuck fan. It is a story of resilience, a story of small victories and defeats at the end. A story where you end up losing whether you try and go high and be fair, or where you lose your mind and rage against injustice with reckless intent and end up being disliked. We are always going to the dismissed underdog.

 

The second thing is – embrace the Orca. Orcas are beautiful, powerful smart creatures who live in tight knit pods and hunt together. To paraphrase an overused quote, they do not consider the feelings of those that they hunt and kill. Penguins, seals, sharks are all just lower things on the food chain which the Orcas attack from the depths. It’s time to quit feeling like we’re cursed or wronged. It’s time to stop trying to explain and seeking understanding from anyone else. It’s time to accept that we are an apex predator, we are the villains in other’s stories and to just go out there and win. Only 9 more to go, why can't we flip the script and take it all.

 

Update: Tonight our dreams rely on orca ruthlessness. We must attack as a pod, take bite out of the superstars and put together shifts where we body them and break them down. We counter attack and score and break all the NHL marketing department hopes. Absolute underdogs tonight and tonight we show them that this is our year no matter the odds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

   

 

 

      

Edited 1 hour ago by OldFaithfulcap

[Northern_Nuck]

Interesting fact…. Tocchet was an assistant coach on the avalanche during that Moore/Bertuzzi incident. 

[Morgan 33]

The 2011 Canuck's big mistake was trying to out muscle the Bruins as it resulted in costly injuries and suspensions.  They should have just relied on their skill like they had in the WCF.  Great read.  The Orca is my favorite Canucks logo.

[ABNuck]

2011 we were screwed. There was nothing we could do. The Director of the Player Safety Committee's son played for the Bruins. Rome takes out Horton and is suspended for the series. Boychuk cross checks Raymond, breaks his back and doesn't even get 2 minutes. And the image of Marchand (the little POS) punching a Sedin in the face RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE REF and no call...pretty much summed up the way the series was going to go. Our offence did dry up in the finals BUT, if the DPS would have just played it fairly and honestly well...who knows. I just hate that politics and nepotism ends up in the game AT ALL, no matter what the finale ended up being.

[DANJR]

I have said this a hundred times, and I will never stop saying it!  "We will never win the Stanley Cup with Roger's statue outside the building."

I love Roger and that Canucks era.  It is a slap in the face of the league and the officials.  

Why do you think we've been penalized more than Nashville through this entire series so far.  Not one game have Vancouver recieved more power play time.
If I had the time I would go through Vancouvers playoff history to find these stats.

[IBatch]

16 hours ago, ABNuck said:

2011 we were screwed. There was nothing we could do. The Director of the Player Safety Committee's son played for the Bruins. Rome takes out Horton and is suspended for the series. Boychuk cross checks Raymond, breaks his back and doesn't even get 2 minutes. And the image of Marchand (the little POS) punching a Sedin in the face RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE REF and no call...pretty much summed up the way the series was going to go. Our offence did dry up in the finals BUT, if the DPS would have just played it fairly and honestly well...who knows. I just hate that politics and nepotism ends up in the game AT ALL, no matter what the finale ended up being.

We had two power plays, for everyone one they got.   It's not like we didn't get our chances. 

[Steamer4GM]

On 4/30/2024 at 11:23 AM, OldFaithfulcap said:

I've had this idea for a while, sometimes I think about extending it and editing it fully and seeing if any other website would pick it up but decided to put it here tonight

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

View from the Orca's eyes: An alternative history of the NHL and why the Canucks are due

 

The NHL like all good sports league carefully crafts its own story. From the Original Six to Wayne Gretzky, the narrative comes out about the stars who won the Stanley Cup and the next generation of stars like Connor McDavid and Nathan Mackinnon. Turn on a US broadcast and you’ll see Mr Leadership award Mark Messier talk about his glory days and some throwback reference to Cup winners like the 80s Islanders, Edmonton or Chicago. But not all stories get told.

Vancouver is one of the world’s most beautiful cities. It sits beneath the Coast Mountains; it breathes the soft arboreal air of the magnificent Stanley Park and its province extends throughout unceded lands across modern day British Columbia. It stands watch over the deep and vast Pacific Ocean, a space so vast it connects the north-west of Canada to distant cities like Tokyo, Sydney and Honolulu.  

 

The Vancouver Canucks joined the league in 1970-71. The team has never settled on a jersey colour for long, moving from the original blue “stick in rink” to the overly vibrant yellow Vs to the black with flying spaghetti skate. The team’s current logo is the Orca, born in the 90s and slightly adjusted ever since. Orcas are a fun logo like the Canuck’s mascot Finn. Their shape lends itself to cute plush toys and they became a justifiable cause to free them from ocean park captivities. Of course, Orcas are also the apex predator of the ocean, able to flip and kill a great white shark with ease and smart enough to hunt whales with sailors in the 1800s. People only seem to pay attention to them when they are doing something like attacking boats in the Mediterranean, which is an apt metaphor for the Canucks.

 

In a post-truth world people still benefit from hearing another perspective and so non-Canuck fans read on and perhaps you’ll understand the world from a Canucks’ view.

 

The surrender gesture of victory

 

The 1981-82 Canucks did not start the season well. They struggled through, losing their coach to suspension toward the end of the season. Their coach Harry Neale was suspended 6 regular season games and 4 postseason games for going into the stands seeking retribution against a fan who had punched one of his players Tiger Williams (who may have done more damage). Their 30-33-17 record qualified them for the playoffs and assistant Roger Neilson bonded the team together and they won the first two playoff rounds. In game 2 versus Chicago, the referee Bob Myers overturned a Canucks goal and handed the BlackHawks some questionable penalties. After the last penalty gave the Blackhawks a 4-1 lead, Neilson placed a white towel on a hockey stick in mock surrender. He and some fellow players who joined in were elected from the game.

Neilson’s act was followed by 3 wins, driven on by a legion of Canucks fans who brought white towels to the game and for the first time in their history they made the Stanley Cup Finals, where unfortunately the New York Islanders swept them.

 

The towels continue to this day. What kind of team turns a gesture of surrender, a defiant act against the officials into a cherished centerpiece of their history? The Canucks do.

 

Messier the villain

 

While Canadians are stereotypically forgiving in nature, a Canuck fans never forgets. Jim Robson’s “he will play, you know he’ll play. He’ll play on crutches.” is a rallying cry for any Canuck fan to carry on. The call accompanied the end of Game 6 of the 1993-94 finals where the Canucks captain, Trevor Linden was repeatedly and illegally crosschecked to the ice by Mark Messier. The unpenalized act and memories of a shot off a crossbar in Game 7 doomed perhaps the most talented Canucks squad (with the most famous Canucks 90s forward Pavel Bure) to another Stanley Cup loss.

 

While Canucks fans disliked Messier for this and bear teeth at every single New York Rangers Cup reference they really despised what came after. 3 seasons after that loss, the Canucks brought on the coach of that New York Rangers team, Mike Keenan who signed Messier and was given the Captaincy from Linden (who was even worse traded). That Canucks team was loaded with talent but they did not gel under a less interested Messier and the core of that squad was moved on after the 1999-00 season. To name a leadership award after Messier is another slight to a fanbase where he failed to achieve anything.

 

The price of revenge

 

While I rely on the experiences and written accounts of vintage fans for the past two eras, I was smack bang in this one in 2004. The Canucks Captain that season was Markus Naslund who was an extremely skilled and perfectly gentlemanly player, a Roger Federer type if I was to make a general comparison. Now you don’t need to understand hockey to know there have always been skilled players, grinders and fighters and you don’t need to understand the hockey code to realize that a cheap shot from a grinder, a rookie no less, on a player who had scored the second most goals a season earlier (48) is going to make players and fans mad. And mad the Canucks team and fans were, for on February 16,  Steve Moore a rookie grinder on Colorado elbowed the Canucks captain in the head while both players were going for a loose puck. Naslund missed games and while the next Canucks-Avs meeting had no incidents (with the NHL commissioner watching), the next Vancouver home game on March 8 started the cry for revenge.

I was at the game wearing my red alternate Orca Bertuzzi jersey. The crowd buzzed and waited. Matt Cooke, a smallish pest who was not a fighter, challenged Moore and the meek fight did nothing. The game was an awful blowout by the Avalanche but the Canucks fans cheered every hit and as the game hit the 3^rd period the scent of bloodlust remained. I remember watching a shift where Moore was briefly entangled with Naslund and then I saw Bertuzzi make a move for him, shouting at the rookie. It wasn’t all in the one motion (I think the puck went into the Colorado zone and then came up the ice) but then in a moment of madness Bertuzzi punched Moore from behind and a number of players jumped on top. The crowd cheered wildly, driven by revenge and as they carted Moore off the ice I remember the jumbotron showing the bloody patch of ice which brought further cheers from the crowd. At the time I was a big fan of revenge and was happy I had seen it. With years of hindsight, the extent of Moore’s injury and the impact on Bertuzzi and Vancouver I have certainly softened and wished Bertuzzi had crushed Moore with one of his hits or at least fought him face to face. That being said, the hit on Naslund still makes me angry.

 

The bullies win

 

Boston isn’t known for good sportsmanship. It’s known for hard teams who play dirty and who have success. In 2010-11 the stars seemed to align for Vancouver. Led by the nice Sedin twins (who played much like Naslund and were gentlemen), goaltender Roberto Luongo, and their less gentlemanly players like Alex Burrows, Ryan Kesler and Kevin Bieksa they beat their Western conference finals and made the Stanley Cup Finals.

 

Boston was a grittier larger team from the get go. This was apparent early. The Canucks tried to respond in kind but one of their hits by Aaron Rome earned the Canucks player a 4-game suspension. A week later one of the Canucks skilled players, Mason Raymond was badly injured when rammed into the boards by a Boston defencemen, Johnny Boychuk. He suffered a spinal injury and was out the rest of the playoffs - there was no suspension for Boychuk. The Canucks were outmuscled and Luongo outplayed during the finals there is no doubt, but the narrative quickly became how the Canucks were pests and dirty and this still gets rolled out. There’s no mention of Boston being the bullies, rarely much press given to the Boston goalie’s dismissal of Obama by not going to the white house. The last remaining player on that Boston team, the now captain Brad Marchand, remains the most disliked player by everyone outside of Beantown and has consistently avoided suspensions for borderline play. It’s one thing to lose to a dirty team, it’s quite unfair to have the villains rewritten as the heroes.

 

The coach fiasco

 

The Canucks had a lovable coach named Bruce Boudreau. Great guy, his teams did very well in the regular season but they had faltered in the playoffs. The Canucks were struggling badly in 2022-23 and a large part of it was because the Canucks GM did not see Bruce as the future of the team. This was badly handled as everyone knew Bruce was on borrowed time and had a decimated and woeful blueline and lower lines and no goalie depth due to injury. The Canucks became the laughing stock of the league as the bruce saga dragged on, JT Miller was scapegoated as showing no effort on Hockey Night in Canada and finally Bruce was replaced by the Canuck’s favoured coach Tocchet. It certainly was badly handled and when the team started winning and reducing its odds of drafting local junior hero Connor Bedard the fanbase again groaned at pointless wins.

 

The now

 

Vancouver in 2023-24 won the Pacific Division for the first time, finishing 6^th overall. The structure of Tocchet and free agent work has enabled them to have an amazing regular season, where they made history via players hitting career milestones (Brock Boeser 40 goals, JT Miller 100, Quinn Hughes 92 points) and team efforts (winning all games on the New York road trip for the first time ever). They were barely favoured to win their first round around Nashville and were no-one’s pick to advance to the finals. As of this writing, they lead Nashville 3-1 and few scribes think they’ll win the series.

 

Flipping the script

 

In planning on writing this I’ve come to realize two things. Firstly, few other hockey fans or non-fans have any idea about the history of being a Canuck fan. It is a story of resilience, a story of small victories and defeats at the end. A story where you end up losing whether you try and go high and be fair, or where you lose your mind and rage against injustice with reckless intent and end up being disliked. We are always going to the dismissed underdog.

 

The second thing is – embrace the Orca. Orcas are beautiful, powerful smart creatures who live in tight knit pods and hunt together. To paraphrase an overused quote, they do not consider the feelings of those that they hunt and kill. Penguins, seals, sharks are all just lower things on the food chain which the Orcas attack from the depths. It’s time to quit feeling like we’re cursed or wronged. It’s time to stop trying to explain and seeking understanding from anyone else. It’s time to accept that we are an apex predator, we are the villains in other’s stories and to just go out there and win. Only 13 more to go, why can't we flip the script and take it all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

   

 

 

      

Very entertaining read. Thanks for compiling and posting all that. Much of it took me back to a range of awesome and not so awesome times as a fan in years and decades past and I really liked the concept of the Orca's view

 

You didn't ask for critical feedback but I'll offer 2 small bits anyways

 

1 - If you really wanted to get some traction with this out there in the larger world, flesh it out a bit further to include the both of the riots and how that impacted the larger fan base and the team and city's perception around the league and how that all fits with or skews the narrative you're presenting

 

2 - Share it with someone you know and trust to give it a thorough proofread and edit as there's a number of sentences that could benefit from grammar fixes or adjustment of very minor issues. Cleaning up that kind of stuff can take a very good read to a really outstanding one

[OldFaithfulcap]

43 minutes ago, Steamer4GM said:

Very entertaining read. Thanks for compiling and posting all that. Much of it took me back to a range of awesome and not so awesome times as a fan in years and decades past and I really liked the concept of the Orca's view

 

You didn't ask for critical feedback but I'll offer 2 small bits anyways

 

1 - If you really wanted to get some traction with this out there in the larger world, flesh it out a bit further to include the both of the riots and how that impacted the larger fan base and the team and city's perception around the league and how that all fits with or skews the narrative you're presenting

 

2 - Share it with someone you know and trust to give it a thorough proofread and edit as there's a number of sentences that could benefit from grammar fixes or adjustment of very minor issues. Cleaning up that kind of stuff can take a very good read to a really outstanding one

 

Thanks for the nice feedback. I never will understand the riots myself so it didn't even enter my view but i could mention it. I don't seem them as having anything to do with hockey myself. I was frustrated, i threw stuff out, i took a 12 year break but never for a second did i want to cause damage to anyone else as they weren't the cause. 

 

It does need an edit and proofread as it is a first draft, but then i doubt i'll submit it anywhere.

 

 

Edited May 4 by OldFaithfulcap

[RJCF96]

On 5/2/2024 at 10:07 PM, ABNuck said:

2011 we were screwed. There was nothing we could do. The Director of the Player Safety Committee's son played for the Bruins. Rome takes out Horton and is suspended for the series. Boychuk cross checks Raymond, breaks his back and doesn't even get 2 minutes. And the image of Marchand (the little POS) punching a Sedin in the face RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE REF and no call...pretty much summed up the way the series was going to go. Our offence did dry up in the finals BUT, if the DPS would have just played it fairly and honestly well...who knows. I just hate that politics and nepotism ends up in the game AT ALL, no matter what the finale ended up being.

Tim Thomas was using illegal size pads during that run. Hockey is a game of inches, if he used regular size pads, maybe some of those saves would have been goals.

[Bob Long]

30 minutes ago, RJCF96 said:

Tim Thomas was using illegal size pads during that run.

 

I've never heard this before, I'm assuming nothing was done.

[Psycho_Path]

On 5/3/2024 at 11:22 AM, DANJR said:

I have said this a hundred times, and I will never stop saying it!  "We will never win the Stanley Cup with Roger's statue outside the building."

I love Roger and that Canucks era.  It is a slap in the face of the league and the officials.  

Why do you think we've been penalized more than Nashville through this entire series so far.  Not one game have Vancouver recieved more power play time.
If I had the time I would go through Vancouvers playoff history to find these stats.

You realize the reason that statue exists is because of biased officiating against us? aka. whether the statue's there or not, it's always going to be this way (so long as Bettman or anyone like him is in charge). The league doesn't give a shit about the Canucks as it doesn't really provide overall increase to revenue when the Canucks do well, plus the Canucks aren't an original six team, so they don't have a real voice in the league.

Edited May 7 by Psycho_Path

[Silent Man]

On 4/30/2024 at 11:23 AM, OldFaithfulcap said:

I've had this idea for a while, sometimes I think about extending it and editing it fully and seeing if any other website would pick it up but decided to put it here tonight

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

View from the Orca's eyes: An alternative history of the NHL and why the Canucks are due

 

The NHL like all good sports league carefully crafts its own story. From the Original Six to Wayne Gretzky, the narrative comes out about the stars who won the Stanley Cup and the next generation of stars like Connor McDavid and Nathan Mackinnon. Turn on a US broadcast and you’ll see Mr Leadership award Mark Messier talk about his glory days and some throwback reference to Cup winners like the 80s Islanders, Edmonton or Chicago. But not all stories get told.

Vancouver is one of the world’s most beautiful cities. It sits beneath the Coast Mountains; it breathes the soft arboreal air of the magnificent Stanley Park and its province extends throughout unceded lands across modern day British Columbia. It stands watch over the deep and vast Pacific Ocean, a space so vast it connects the north-west of Canada to distant cities like Tokyo, Sydney and Honolulu.  

 

The Vancouver Canucks joined the league in 1970-71. The team has never settled on a jersey colour for long, moving from the original blue “stick in rink” to the overly vibrant yellow Vs to the black with flying spaghetti skate. The team’s current logo is the Orca, born in the 90s and slightly adjusted ever since. Orcas are a fun logo like the Canuck’s mascot Finn. Their shape lends itself to cute plush toys and they became a justifiable cause to free them from ocean park captivities. Of course, Orcas are also the apex predator of the ocean, able to flip and kill a great white shark with ease and smart enough to hunt whales with sailors in the 1800s. People only seem to pay attention to them when they are doing something like attacking boats in the Mediterranean, which is an apt metaphor for the Canucks.

 

In a post-truth world people still benefit from hearing another perspective and so non-Canuck fans read on and perhaps you’ll understand the world from a Canucks’ view.

 

The surrender gesture of victory

 

The 1981-82 Canucks did not start the season well. They struggled through, losing their coach to suspension toward the end of the season. Their coach Harry Neale was suspended 6 regular season games and 4 postseason games for going into the stands seeking retribution against a fan who had punched one of his players Tiger Williams (who may have done more damage). Their 30-33-17 record qualified them for the playoffs and assistant Roger Neilson bonded the team together and they won the first two playoff rounds. In game 2 versus Chicago, the referee Bob Myers overturned a Canucks goal and handed the BlackHawks some questionable penalties. After the last penalty gave the Blackhawks a 4-1 lead, Neilson placed a white towel on a hockey stick in mock surrender. He and some fellow players who joined in were elected from the game.

Neilson’s act was followed by 3 wins, driven on by a legion of Canucks fans who brought white towels to the game and for the first time in their history they made the Stanley Cup Finals, where unfortunately the New York Islanders swept them.

 

The towels continue to this day. What kind of team turns a gesture of surrender, a defiant act against the officials into a cherished centerpiece of their history? The Canucks do.

 

Messier the villain

 

While Canadians are stereotypically forgiving in nature, a Canuck fans never forgets. Jim Robson’s “he will play, you know he’ll play. He’ll play on crutches.” is a rallying cry for any Canuck fan to carry on. The call accompanied the end of Game 6 of the 1993-94 finals where the Canucks captain, Trevor Linden was repeatedly and illegally crosschecked to the ice by Mark Messier. The unpenalized act and memories of a shot off a crossbar in Game 7 doomed perhaps the most talented Canucks squad (with the most famous Canucks 90s forward Pavel Bure) to another Stanley Cup loss.

 

While Canucks fans disliked Messier for this and bear teeth at every single New York Rangers Cup reference they really despised what came after. 3 seasons after that loss, the Canucks brought on the coach of that New York Rangers team, Mike Keenan who signed Messier and was given the Captaincy from Linden (who was even worse traded). That Canucks team was loaded with talent but they did not gel under a less interested Messier and the core of that squad was moved on after the 1999-00 season. To name a leadership award after Messier is another slight to a fanbase where he failed to achieve anything.

 

The price of revenge

 

While I rely on the experiences and written accounts of vintage fans for the past two eras, I was smack bang in this one in 2004. The Canucks Captain that season was Markus Naslund who was an extremely skilled and perfectly gentlemanly player, a Roger Federer type if I was to make a general comparison. Now you don’t need to understand hockey to know there have always been skilled players, grinders and fighters and you don’t need to understand the hockey code to realize that a cheap shot from a grinder, a rookie no less, on a player who had scored the second most goals a season earlier (48) is going to make players and fans mad. And mad the Canucks team and fans were, for on February 16,  Steve Moore a rookie grinder on Colorado elbowed the Canucks captain in the head while both players were going for a loose puck. Naslund missed games and while the next Canucks-Avs meeting had no incidents (with the NHL commissioner watching), the next Vancouver home game on March 8 started the cry for revenge.

I was at the game wearing my red alternate Orca Bertuzzi jersey. The crowd buzzed and waited. Matt Cooke, a smallish pest who was not a fighter, challenged Moore and the meek fight did nothing. The game was an awful blowout by the Avalanche but the Canucks fans cheered every hit and as the game hit the 3^rd period the scent of bloodlust remained. I remember watching a shift where Moore was briefly entangled with Naslund and then I saw Bertuzzi make a move for him, shouting at the rookie. It wasn’t all in the one motion (I think the puck went into the Colorado zone and then came up the ice) but then in a moment of madness Bertuzzi punched Moore from behind and a number of players jumped on top. The crowd cheered wildly, driven by revenge and as they carted Moore off the ice I remember the jumbotron showing the bloody patch of ice which brought further cheers from the crowd. At the time I was a big fan of revenge and was happy I had seen it. With years of hindsight, the extent of Moore’s injury and the impact on Bertuzzi and Vancouver I have certainly softened and wished Bertuzzi had crushed Moore with one of his hits or at least fought him face to face. That being said, the hit on Naslund still makes me angry.

 

The bullies win

 

Boston isn’t known for good sportsmanship. It’s known for hard teams who play dirty and who have success. In 2010-11 the stars seemed to align for Vancouver. Led by the nice Sedin twins (who played much like Naslund and were gentlemen), goaltender Roberto Luongo, and their less gentlemanly players like Alex Burrows, Ryan Kesler and Kevin Bieksa they beat their Western conference finals and made the Stanley Cup Finals.

 

Boston was a grittier larger team from the get go. This was apparent early. The Canucks tried to respond in kind but one of their hits by Aaron Rome earned the Canucks player a 4-game suspension. A week later one of the Canucks skilled players, Mason Raymond was badly injured when rammed into the boards by a Boston defencemen, Johnny Boychuk. He suffered a spinal injury and was out the rest of the playoffs - there was no suspension for Boychuk. The Canucks were outmuscled and Luongo outplayed during the finals there is no doubt, but the narrative quickly became how the Canucks were pests and dirty and this still gets rolled out. There’s no mention of Boston being the bullies, rarely much press given to the Boston goalie’s dismissal of Obama by not going to the white house. The last remaining player on that Boston team, the now captain Brad Marchand, remains the most disliked player by everyone outside of Beantown and has consistently avoided suspensions for borderline play. It’s one thing to lose to a dirty team, it’s quite unfair to have the villains rewritten as the heroes.

 

The coach fiasco

 

The Canucks had a lovable coach named Bruce Boudreau. Great guy, his teams did very well in the regular season but they had faltered in the playoffs. The Canucks were struggling badly in 2022-23 and a large part of it was because the Canucks GM did not see Bruce as the future of the team. This was badly handled as everyone knew Bruce was on borrowed time and had a decimated and woeful blueline and lower lines and no goalie depth due to injury. The Canucks became the laughing stock of the league as the bruce saga dragged on, JT Miller was scapegoated as showing no effort on Hockey Night in Canada and finally Bruce was replaced by the Canuck’s favoured coach Tocchet. It certainly was badly handled and when the team started winning and reducing its odds of drafting local junior hero Connor Bedard the fanbase again groaned at pointless wins.

 

The now

 

Vancouver in 2023-24 won the Pacific Division for the first time, finishing 6^th overall. The structure of Tocchet and free agent work has enabled them to have an amazing regular season, where they made history via players hitting career milestones (Brock Boeser 40 goals, JT Miller 100, Quinn Hughes 92 points) and team efforts (winning all games on the New York road trip for the first time ever). They were barely favoured to win their first round around Nashville and were no-one’s pick to advance to the finals. As of this writing, they lead Nashville 3-1 and few scribes think they’ll win the series.

 

Flipping the script

 

In planning on writing this I’ve come to realize two things. Firstly, few other hockey fans or non-fans have any idea about the history of being a Canuck fan. It is a story of resilience, a story of small victories and defeats at the end. A story where you end up losing whether you try and go high and be fair, or where you lose your mind and rage against injustice with reckless intent and end up being disliked. We are always going to the dismissed underdog.

 

The second thing is – embrace the Orca. Orcas are beautiful, powerful smart creatures who live in tight knit pods and hunt together. To paraphrase an overused quote, they do not consider the feelings of those that they hunt and kill. Penguins, seals, sharks are all just lower things on the food chain which the Orcas attack from the depths. It’s time to quit feeling like we’re cursed or wronged. It’s time to stop trying to explain and seeking understanding from anyone else. It’s time to accept that we are an apex predator, we are the villains in other’s stories and to just go out there and win. Only 13 more to go, why can't we flip the script and take it all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

   

 

 

      

Great read, Big thank you