In today’s Vancouver Province, news which warms my cold, blackened, disappointed Canucks-fan heart:
For a week now, Canucks head coach Alain Vigneault has spent his days at GM Place on the hot seat.
For a couple hours, sometimes more, each day, he’s been brought in to informally defend, dissect and rehash a season most are trying to forget. He’s not done yet.
“It’s still ongoing, it’s going to take even more time,” Canucks GM Mike Gillis said.
Read the whole article. It looks at both sides of whether to keep Vigneault, but is still a beacon of hope if you’re praying for a more-offensively-geared team to return in the future, as I most certainly am.
In other news, all this talk about Hockey-Reference.com player sponsorships entertained me, so I jumped into the pool… except I couldn’t decide which player to sponsor, so I just sponsored the whole, crazy team by taking the Canucks page.
*Feel free to suggest a different slogan. My recent cynicism probably needs tempering… It currently reads:
The Vancouver Canucks: A team best enjoyed if you possess a great deal of patience, a tolerance for disappointment, and a fully-stocked liquor cabinet.

I’m not pining for a more offensive style. I know Aquilini got sort of mocked for saying he wanted the Canucks to have a “winning style”, but I somewhat agree with him. They played the exact same style the season before and it was surprisingly fun to watch them win 2-1 games over and over. Maybe it’s because I played defense as a kid, but I loved watching a healthy Vancouver defense corps shutting everything down (as long as it was winning games).
I also generally agree with the line of thought that Vigneault had to employ that style with the lack of offensive skill up front. I’m no great fan of the guy, but I don’t think he had much to work with. Upgrade two wingers on the top two lines to add an extra 20 goals, luck out with a healthy blueline to chip in with some offense, and suddenly nobody is noticing the tight defensive style at all.
Posted by Jeremy from Summerland, BC on 05/09 at 04:39 PM