Oh, Canucks. You finished your swan dive out of the playoffs Saturday with a 7-1 loss to the Calgary Flames, a fitting score as the inverse was your win-loss record over the last eight games.
In a shameful display of rolling over, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the last time my kids’ Golden Retriever bitch wanted her belly rubbed, you hung goalie Roberto Luongo out to dry for three goals on nine shots, allowed Flames captain Jarome Iginla to score his 50th goal of the season (SOMEBODY may as well have a good year, right?) and turned what may have been Trevor Linden and Markus Naslund’s last game in Canucks jerseys into a painful embarrassment.
Tellingly, the only player to show up at the optional game-day practice was Luongo. I think that says “everyone who has recently questioned my heart and my commitment can fuck off.” That’s why he gets the big bucks. As for the rest of the you, it says “we have no pride. We don’t care. We’d rather have a day off, since we’re only going to have an entire summer filled with days off after we choked on our own season and we need one more.”
Well, I’ve had enough. I’ve been a loyal, die-hard fan for years, beginning when I moved to Vancouver in the early 90s, and through my move to Calgary. I’ve endured five years of taunting and lost bets at the hands of obnoxious Flames fans. During the accursed 2004 Cup run, when the streets of Calgary were filled with hotties taking their “shirts off for Kiprusoff,”, a lesser man would have crumbled and jumped on the bandwagon. Not me. I stayed true. I defended Dan Cloutier, for Christ’s sake! “Oh no, he’s not a sieve. He’s the only Canucks goalie with 30-plus wins in three consecutive seasons. You clearly don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And how do you repay me? With this travesty. This abomination. Well, no more. Until you can prove to me you’re committed to winning, and making some real changes, I don’t want to see you anymore. I don’t want to hear any more of your lip service, and your hollow promises. Until then, you’re dead to me.
And just so you know, a top-down house-cleaning, starting with Dave Nonis and Alain Vigneault, would go a long way toward patching things up. If you care. Which you clearly don’t.
Lastly: Govechkin! Anyone know where I can buy some Capitals gear? The stores around here are all sold out. (Oddly, the shelves are brimming with unsold Sidney Crosby-branded paraphernalia.) I don’t want to buy it from the NHL online store, since they take 7-10 days just to ship. Seriously, in 2008, what kind of dinosaur-like order fulfillment system takes 7-10 business days before they can get something out of the warehouse? Does it take that long for the gerbils to run from the computer to the shipping/receiving dock?
- The Sieve
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Tags: alain vigneault, canucks, choke artistry, dave nonis, govechkin, losing, roberto luongo
Angry young man!
I’ve been sorely disappointed by the Canucks 2 out of 3 years since I left Vancouver and took my Nonis-coloured glasses off. Right now I’m a bigger Oilers fan because, even though they didn’t make the playoffs either for two of three years, they left their hearts, minds, and various body parts all over the ice each season. When the Oilers got knocked out by Calgary they spent the entire last period standing on Kipper’s stick and buzzing like bees. They wanted it so bad you could taste it in Albuquerque. Besides Rick Rypien, who ain’t going to win you a game, the Canucks got rolled out of the playoff race like a sleeping dog gets rolled off the bed when the alarm sounds and Daddy has to go to work. Stoll got his ear stitched up without anesthetic and came back to score the game winner when he could have been cleaning up his gear and cracking a Heinie, and nobody would have thought less of him for it. Where was that spirit from Vancouver? They were still in it, for God’s sake!
Missing a couple of defencemen? The Oilers were missing an entire first or second line for almost the entire second half of the season. Deal with !@%!& it!!!!
Not that the Oilers don’t have a long, long way to go, mind you, and not that they should be held up as an example of how to win in the NHL, but they battled and battled this year, while I didn’t see much from the Canucks, who always seem to think they’re owed something–at least since the C left Linden’s chest.
Goodbye West Coast Depress. Naslund and Morrison can move on. Hey, maybe the Penguins would like Naslund back on a line with Sykora and he could retire without the weight of his organization’s success or failure on his back. Love the guy, but his day is done as a captain. It was done a long time ago.
Give the C to Mitchell, use the new money from Nazzy and Mo to sign some good free agents, and send Vigneault to LA to work as assistant coach to Marc Crawford.
Then, seeing as I’m moving to Saskatchewan and I can get all the Canucks and Oilers games from Sportsnet for 5.95 a month, we’ll see who my favorite team is. Once a Canuck, always a Canuck, but JESUS!!!!!!
Let’s get some Habs shit going on here False Gods.
Looks to be the only Canadian team that can win a Cup.
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