Despite my love for the sport, I don’t often blog about
hockey. The sports blogosphere is
already overfull of armchair-types who spend too much time watching and not
enough time playing. But today is an
exception.
It has never been easy to be a Vancouver Canucks fan. And it has been even less easy to be a
Vancouver Canucks fan living outside of Vancouver, as I have been for most of
my life. Aside from being woeful at
playing hockey for most of my youth, the Canucks were also prone to
questionable design decisions regarding their uniforms, being on the losing end
of nearly every trade they made, and having a nickname that conveniently rhymes
with “suck.” You know you have it bad,
when even your high school computer
science teacher would talk smack about your favourite team…
Things started to get a little easier in 1988, when the
Canucks drafted Trevor Linden. This was
before the internet, blogs and twitter made everything so much more instantly
researchable. I didn’t watch him play
major junior, I didn’t know anything about his play in the Memorial Cup. Nothing.
All I knew was that the Canucks had drafted a really good prospect who
could maybe help the team turn things around.
Six years later, the Canucks were in the Stanley Cup Final,
and Trevor Linden had cemented his place as my favourite professional athlete
ever.
It’s difficult to love and hate sports figures as a grown
adult. Each year broadens your
perspective and introduces you to other things that make sports so much less
important to you than they used to be. But
in 1994, at the age of 17, nothing mattered more to me than that Canucks team,
and no player on that team mattered more to me than #16.
Today, Trevor Linden was named President of the Vancouver
Canucks.
It’s a great PR move.
I’m far from the only Canucks fan to put Linden on a pedestal. Trevor Linden could say that he wanted to
invade Ukraine, and half the Lower Mainland would be ready to throw the first
molitov cocktail. At a time when the
team is imploding, and the Vancouver fanbase, replete with bandwagon-jumpers,
is waffling on their season-ticket decisions, nobody can secure that season ticket
revenue better than Linden can.
But is it a great hockey move? There is a lot of noise on Twitter and likely
more than a few articles being written that will decry Linden’s lack of hockey
management experience. That’s not a fact
to be argued with. He has none. There is no way to deny it: This isn’t the best hockey move the team can
make.
The thing is, it doesn’t have to be.
Being a Canucks fan has always required a nearly absurd
amount of faith, belief, and optimism. Noone
has ever answered that better than Trevor Linden.
And even then, we still fell one goal-post short of winning
it all with him.
Nonetheless, we all remember that team, and we all remember
Linden as the guy who scored two goals in Game 7 of the Cup Final while playing
with broken ribs.
The Canucks, as a franchise, are a mess. They’ve traded away two all-star caliber goalies
in two years for pennies on the dollar.
They’re built around an increasingly fragile and aging core, with too
little depth. Their coach may be a
certifiable lunatic with no idea as to how he should play his roster. If Linden needs time to fix this mess, time
to learn how to be an NHL executive, the fans will give him that time – he’s
earned it more than anybody.
In today’s Vancouver Province, Jason Botchford suggested
that Canucks fans would rather lose with Linden than win with somebody else. That’s a ridiculous statement. Canucks fans want to win. And there is nobody else in the world we want
to win with more than Trevor Linden.
