The Legion of Blog - the Canucks 7th Men

Apologies in advance to all of my international readers (Hi, Sven!), because this post is going to be very Vancouver-centric. In fact, it's going to be hockey-centric, so that probably kills many of the rest of my audience.

But I don't care, because it's my blog and I can make what I want out of it. I can make a hat, or a brooch, or a pterodactyl (10,000 Quatloos for whoever gets that reference).

Anyway, it's time for the NHL playoffs to start! Game One is tonight, where the Vancouver Canucks play the Los Angeles Kings in a best of seven series. Assuming they're able to repeat last year's efforts (and hopefully win one more game), this is the beginning of a grueling two months of hockey, for both the players but also the fans who live and die with their team. Garments will be rent, much beer consumed, and people will fall off the Bandwagon and climb back on as their team's fortunes ebb and flow. It's a great time to be a hockey fan.

Today's blog is to extol the virtues of a gaggle of great guys, collectively known as the Legion of Blog from the Vancouver Province sports section. These guys together do a bunch of humorous Vancouver Canucks posts about anything and everything regarding the team, and hockey in general. Do the Canucks need Trevor Linden to be part of the team in order to win the Cup this year? Wyatt Arndt makes the case for why the team should hire him for the inevitable press box shot to push the team over the edge.

Does Don Cherry confuse you as much as he does the rest of Canada?

He probably does, especially when he makes you wonder what sofa no longer has any upholstery on it.

Anyway, Cam Charron agrees with you! And he'll showcase it every week.

I read these guys religiously, always checking to see what other new posts may have come up since the last time I looked. Since there are four of them (five? I think four), there are guaranteed to be posts every day (or almost every day, anyway). Of course, as with every comedy routine, there are some that bomb, but their hit rates are generally pretty good. I love the post-game recaps done by Wyatt, the Post-Game Quotes We Wish Were Real done by J. Bowman.

While I like all of the bloggers on there, I really like Wyatt because we've connected on Twitter a few times. I followed him before he became a blogger.

He's known on Twitter as "The Stanchion," and he created the account after this legendary goal by Kevin Bieksa in Game 5 of the series against San Jose.

The puck rebounded off the stanchion and right to Bieksa's stick. Wyatt's twitter feed was hilarious for months after that as he pretended to actually be the Stanchion (talking about the Canucks may not offer him a contract this year, things like that), until the Province was looking to replace their current sports humour bloggers. Wayne was one of the people who applied, and the Province decided to go with a Legion instead.

I also feel a connection with Wayne because he works at UBC, but that's neither here nor there. We've never actually met.

Whatever the case, all of the bloggers in the Legion are hilarious and well-worth reading, and may get Canucks fans through this long two-month ordeal (hopefully two months, or it will mean they bowed out early).

Because even when your team is down for the count, you need to laugh.

*Edit*Oh, how embarrassing. "Wayne" Arndt notified me that, of course, his name is *Wyatt*, not Wayne. The perils of dashing off posts on your lunch break. Sorry, Wyatt!!!

The NHL is becoming a joke

It's Saturday, three days after the Canucks lost Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals, and the disappointment still lingers a bit.

But that's not why the NHL is a joke. Or at least that's not when it became obvious to us that it is becoming one. It just reinforced the issue.

The NHL, under Gary Bettman's tenure, has turned into an organization that is destroying our love of the game of hockey.

(Thanks to...well, you can find this picture EVERYWHERE)

The Stanley Cup Finals just showed a spotlight on everything that we're growing to hate about it.

It's becoming a league where thuggery is not only being allowed, but encouraged.

Now, I'm not one of those "ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww, get fighting out of the game!" type people. I love a good fight between two willing combatants, when one guy comes to the defense of a teammate. I love me a good body check, and even more so a good hip check.



That, along with the goal-scoring, is what hockey is to me.

It's not cheap shots after the whistle, or even during play.



It's not slashing somebody to the point where two of their fingers are broken (like the slash Alex Edler received in Game 6 of the Finals, making him largely ineffective in Game 7). The organized, post-whistle activities were just sickening to see.

But again, this isn't just about the Finals, and it's not a whine-fest about the Canucks losing. This sort of thing has been going on for a while now.

There's the inconsistent standards of officiating, where what a penalty is doesn't just change from game to game, but from period to period. It's gotten to the point where the players don't even know what a penalty is anymore. Is it any wonder that there's an epidemic of diving going on? When somebody gets cross-checked in the back ten times, with no penalty called, I wouldn't blame somebody for thinking they have to dive to make sure the ref sees the play.

It's not just the penalties, but the supplementary discipline as well. There were two horrible hits in the Stanley Cup Finals. First, Aaron Rome knocked Nathan Horton out of the series with a huge open-ice hit that was late. It was a hockey-play gone wrong (it was definitely late and should have been a penalty for that), but it earned him an unprecedented 4-game suspension. Playoff games are widely considered to be worth double a regular season game, so it would have been 8 games.

The reasoning for this was given, among other things, as the lateness of the hit and the severity of the injury. Yet in Game 6, Mason Raymond gets a compressed vertebrae after being crunched into the boards by an extremely late hit. No penalty on the play, and no suspension.

What the hell?

Personally, I don't think either should have been suspended, because they were hockey plays gone wrong. But if you use that reasoning to suspend Rome, you have to be consistent and suspend the Bruin player too.

Suspensions during the regular season have been just as questionable, mostly on the "way too low" side. Somebody gets run into a stanchion and almost breaks his neck, and there's no suspension for it. Vicious slashes and cross-checks to the head get a game or two at most.

The on-ice product has deteriorated markedly since the NHL lock-out supposedly "fixed" things by calling the rulebook as it is. There would be no more hooking and holding to slow the game down. It would be called no matter when it happened.

Over the years, that standard has slowly disappeared. It's not completely gone, and fast teams can still play well in the regular season. But it's now inconsistent. What's called in the 1st period probably won't be called in the 3rd.

These issues have made it a lot less fun to watch hockey.

I'm a Canucks fan through and through. I bleed blue and green. I will never stop supporting the Canucks.

We have season tickets, but we have seriously considered dropping them because of what a gong show the NHL has become. Every year, we have to make that decision to renew, and every year, we come close to saying "no more."

But we keep coming back. Because these are the Canucks. Would dropping them be cutting off our noses to spite our faces? While the Canucks do have to give a cut of the money to the NHL, we would be hurting the Canucks by abandoning them more than we would be hurting the NHL.

The Canucks players, to a man, talk about the wonderful fanbase in this city, and how well they're treated (despite the intense scrutiny that they receive, and the sometimes unwarranted criticism by fans who get on players way too easily). They talk about taking less money to play here because they love the organization and they love us, the fans who support them. How can you turn your back on that?

Our compromise is to never buy any merchandising, as the NHL gets reams of money off of that. We will not be getting NHL Centre Ice this year (NHL Centre Ice is a package for your digital cable TV package where you can watch almost any hockey game that's on, rather than depending on what your local stations are showing). We will not be spending a cent on any kind of merchandise with the NHL logo on it. It's sad that the Canucks can't sell anything without that logo, as we'd love to give our money to the Canucks. But we just can't do it.

The NHL (and the Canucks, admittedly) made a mint during this Stanley Cup run, with Canucks merchandise flying off of the shelves. I wonder how many people who were buying stuff are bandwagon fans, not even caring about any of these issues.

(Thanks to Hockey-Jerseys.ca)

And I wonder if the true fans who continue to buy the products have thought about how much of that money is going to an organization that is running hockey into the ground.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't buy anything. That's a personal decision, because the Canucks (or the other teams, if it's their stuff) are getting a big cut of that as well.

But it's not something that we can support. The Canucks will get our ticket money. Their TV broadcasts will get our viewership (not that we're a Nielsen family anyway). They will get the one Diet Coke that we buy at the game every time we go.

But the NHL will not be getting any of our money directly.

And if we ever discover that Canucks owner Francesco Aquilini voted to keep Gary Bettman in place as Commissioner of the NHL, we might abandon the team as well.

Tom Larscheid leaving the Canucks booth after 30 years

I say this with a bit of a tear in the eye, as a Vancouver Canucks fan for the last 12 years. After the first game of this upcoming season (the team's 40th anniversary), Tom Larscheid will be hanging up the radio microphone as colour analyst for the team.

In these modern times when most hockey games are available on TV, I don't listen to them on the radio much any more. However, when I do, I will greatly miss hearing Larscheid's passionate voice analyzing the play of our favourite team.

Yes, he is a "homer" (for those not into the lingo, that means that he's very obviously rooting for his team), but he was much more than that.

Yes, he rooted for the Canucks. He got overly excited about an excellent Luongo save or a great Daniel Sedin goal. But he was a hockey fan too. He obviously didn't get excited about somebody on the other team scoring a goal against us, but he did admire the beauty of it, or the tenacity of the goal-scorer if it was a scrum. And he wasn't afraid to tell it like it was if one of the Canucks fucked up to cause the goal.

"Lets face facts Jan Bulis is just a dumb hockey player." You can say what you will about whether he should actually be insulting a player, but I use this mainly to illustrate that he wasn't beholden to the team, and was willing to speak his mind about them.

"That was just AWFUL!" he shouted one time after a truly poor defensive play resulted in a goal. Unlike many homers, he wasn't afraid to rip into the team if they were playing poorly. "That's just unacceptable at the NHL level." While he did comment if the referees were horrible, he would comment if it was for the Canucks as well as if it was against them. And unlike some homers where every call against their team is a horrible call while every call against the other team is perfectly acceptable, he wasn't afraid to just say "that was a stupid penalty to take...you can't do that at this point in the game."

The best thing you can say about him was that he was entertaining. When you can't see what's going on and are relying on the announcers to tell you what's happening, being entertaining is very important. Being knowledgeable is too, and he was that. But if you're not entertaining on the radio, then people are going to tune you out no matter how much you know what you're talking about.

Larscheid was hilarious when he got excited. After a particularly awesome save by Luongo, he shouted "That was highway robbery. Call the coppers!"

Of course, as we are all wont to do when we're doing live radio/audio/whatever, he put his foot in his mouth a few times. One of his most famous ones involved Pavel Bure back in the 90s, when Bure went off the ice for an injury reason. "I just came from the Canucks dressing room and Pavel's groin has never felt better." Or when the team was sucking and Bure was pretty much the only player that was doing anything. "Bure is such a great talent, if only he could play with himself out there, it will really give the fans a show"

We will miss you, Tommy. Enjoy your retirement, and here's to many long, happy years in which you can do so.