July 30 2014 01:11PM
Here are your Puck Headlines: A glorious collection of news and views collected from the greatest blogosphere in sports and the few, the proud, the mainstream hockey media.
RT @NYIslanders : #Isles training camp begins Sept. 18 @ochocinco : I'm also the back up goalie for the NY Islanders... pic.twitter.com/KWHGYdO2VQ — Chad Johnson (@ochocinco) July 30, 2014
• Chad Ochocinco may be in the Canadian Football League right now, but he's hoping to get back to America some way, somehow. His newest plan: backup goalie for the New York Islanders. It'll be an easy transition, since they already have a Chad Johnson in that role.
• What hath the Brendan Shanahan era in Toronto wrought? No major changes to the core, but some serious adjustments to the team's depth, on and off the ice. [ Maple Leafs Hot Stove ]
• The best players from every franchise in the NHL. What, no Jagr? [ ESPN ]
• What do the fancy stats say about Jake Gardiner? He's really good. [ The Score ]
• Alex Semin has gotten married in a secret ceremony. The whole thing is shrouded in mystery, but here's one scandalous detail: Alex Ovechkin wasn't there! Le gasp! [ RMNB ]
• Dan Lacroix has joined the Montreal Canadiens coaching staff as an assistant. [ Canadiens ]
• We've already talked about Steven Stamkos potentially being Leafbron , and going to play in his hometown, but what about P.K. Subban? He certainly doesn't throw any water on the question. Here comes the speculation! All hail Subbron! [ National Post ]
• Paul Stewart on how an NHL official can command respect. [ Huffington Post ]
• The Kings have signed Dwight King to a three-year extension worth $5.85 million. [ LA Kings Insider ]
• What's the greatest hockey game you've ever witnessed? [ The Hockey Writers ]
• Contract negotiations between Mike Babcock and the Detroit Red Wings are on hold. I'm skeptical they're going to go anywhere, either. [ MLive ]
• Trevor Linden on Vancouver radio: "I'm not sure that the intended use of fighting - which is to protect our stars - actually works." [ Canucks Army ]
• I love Joe Pelletier's hockey history. Here's some stuff on the NHL during World War II, when "errant pucks shot into the crowd at games had to be returned because of a rubber shortage." [ Greatest Hockey Legends ]
• The Champions Hockey League has secured a three-year broadcasting deal with One World Sports in the U.S. [ CHL ]
• Nail Yakupov talks about the upcoming season, which is terribly important for his NHL career. [ Oilers Nation ]
• How bad is John Scott going to be for the Sharks? I love that this is the title of this post. [ Fear the Fin ]
• Brad Marchand talks about his hatred for Tomas Plekanec. “I can’t stand him. No, I probably shouldn’t say that. I dislike him very much," he says. It's the turtleneck, I'll bet. [ CSNNE ]
• And finally, here's video of Marchand saying exactly that:
July 29 2014 02:45PM
The Chicago Fire will be eyeing a big response on Wednesday at Toyota Park when the club welcomes Vancouver Whitecaps FC to town.
July 27 2014 06:03PM
FC Dallas and Vancouver Whitecaps FC shared the spoils on Sunday as the Western Conference rivals played to a thrilling 2-2 draw at BC Place.
July 27 2014 05:31PM
Pedro Morales scored on a penalty kick in the 53rd minute to help the Vancouver Whitecaps tie FC Dallas 2-2 on Sunday.
July 27 2014 09:35AM
VANCOUVER - The Vancouver Canucks have signed sixth-overall draft pick Jake Virtanen.
The six-foot, 208-pound right-winger from Abbotsford, B.C., had 45 goals and 71 points in 71 games last season with the Calgary Hitmen of the Western Hockey...
July 27 2014 07:00AM
On the night of July 26, 2013, Martin Baron had a late dinner at Cafe Diplomatico in Little Italy. It was midnight by the time he reached his intersection — Bellwoods Ave. and Dundas St. W., near the Ossington strip.
A streetcar was stopped in the middle of the road. Approaching from the north, Baron assumed it was broken down. But as he got closer, he noticed police officers clustered near the front doors. Two of them had guns drawn. Baron pulled out his iPhone 4s and started filming.
A minute and 36 seconds later, a teenager named Sammy Yatim had been shot eight times with a Glock handgun and shocked with a Taser. Yatim would not survive.
We know this in part because of Baron’s video, which he uploaded to YouTube before going to sleep that night. Twelve months after the 18-year-old from Aleppo, Syria, was killed, Baron’s footage of the tragedy has emerged as a character in its own right, stoking public outrage, shaping legal tactics and raising questions about the power of technology to shape the relationship between governments and the people they govern.
***
If eight shots killed Sammy Yatim, 245 megabytes kept his story alive. That’s the size of Baron’s video file, seemingly the first footage of the Yatim shooting to make it online.
The Toronto architect, who had returned from a business trip at 10 p.m., had no intention of committing an act of citizen journalism when he took out his iPhone, with its powerful 30 frame-per-second video camera. “My reason for filming was nothing more profound than showing my friends on Facebook what a crazy thing had happened outside my house,” he said last week. “I wasn’t trying to document or be altruistic.”
As Baron readied his device, he remembered a friend who had taken a helicopter ride in Hawaii and had been so intent on filming the experience, he forgot to actually look at any of the natural splendour passing through his lens. So instead of watching the streetcar confrontation through his iPhone viewfinder, Baron held the device aloft and watched the drama with his own eyes.
When officers tried to resuscitate Yatim after the shooting, Baron was baffled. “We just thought, ‘What can there possibly be left to perform CPR on?’ ”
Within an hour and a half, he had uploaded the video to YouTube and sent the URL to a couple of TV stations. At about 8 a.m. the next morning a crew from Citytv was at Baron’s door on Bellwoods Ave. In the rush to answer, he didn’t have time to put on socks, and did his interview barefoot.
Uneasy in the spotlight, Baron soon stopped accepting media requests. But his video has taken on a life of its own. A combination of exposure from social and mainstream media helped the 96-second clip capture Toronto’s attention for weeks. More than 40,000 people watched the footage in its first two days online. By July 30, it had reached nearly half a million views.
Among those viewers were members of Yatim’s family. His mother, Sahar Bahadi, and his sister, Sarah Yatim, declined to comment through their lawyer.
But Nabil (Bill) Yatim, Sammy’s father, highlighted the power of the cellphone footage in a statement to the media Saturday. “The YouTube videos captured what happened in the last few moments of his life. Those videos show what happened that night, how his situation was mishandled, and the excessive response to those horrifying few moments,” he wrote. “Why was he shot so many times? Why was he Tasered as he lay dying on the floor of that streetcar? These questions continue to haunt me.”
Also affected by the stark video was Ian Scott, then-head of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), which probes incidents involving police where someone dies, is seriously injured, or alleges sexual assault. On the morning of the shooting, Scott was playing tennis; another player told him about the Yatim video. When the SIU director got home, he opened YouTube on his computer and watched the “disturbing” footage, he said in an email.
Many Toronto residents were also disturbed — and angry. On July 29, hundreds of protesters marched from Yonge-Dundas Square to the site of the shooting, some of them calling police “murderers.” There was another protest on Aug. 13, when more than 500 people gathered outside police headquarters, some taunting the phalanx of cops by dangling doughnuts in front of them.
Julian Falconer, the high-profile civil rights lawyer hired by Yatim’s family after the shooting, attributed the public outcry over Sammy’s death to the YouTube footage. (Another video of the incident taken by Toronto resident Markus Grupp begins about 30 seconds before Baron’s clip. Grupp declined to comment Thursday, saying, “The video really speaks for itself.”)
“I’m confident that the kind of public outrage over the shooting of Sammy Yatim would not have occurred but for the videos,” Falconer said. “Increasingly, the public is aware that there is a serious police failing in this area. And they’re now getting a first-hand view without the filter of a police account or the filter, frankly, of lawyers.”
Related stories on thestar.com:
Iacobucci report calls for a ‘zero deaths’ police culture
Sammy Yatim’s death triggers painful memories for California family
The citizen videographer’s quandary
Baron’s video has figured prominently in the SIU investigation of the shooting and the subsequent court case, too. On Aug. 19, Const. James Forcillo was charged with second-degree murder in Yatim’s death, just the second time an on-duty Toronto police officer has faced such serious charges in more than 20 years. (Peter Brauti, Forcillo’s lawyer, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Forcillo’s case has yet to go to trial.
Scott wrote to the Star on Friday that the YouTube “footage was an important but not determinative part of the investigation.”
“As disturbing as it was,” he wrote of the video, “I waited until the investigation was completed before making the decision to lay a criminal charge related to this incident.”
Others believe the footage played a bigger role.
“In my view, the video is absolutely crucial,” said Peter Rosenthal, a Toronto lawyer who represented the family of Michael Eligon, the 29-year-old shot dead by police in February 2012. “Most of the time when people have been killed by police, there aren’t witnesses other than police, and bystanders who don’t see very well . . . Police officers don’t often testify against each other . . . so there might well not have been charges had there not been a video.”
Police spokesperson Mark Pugash said he could not comment on a case before the courts. “You can’t divorce the video from the case — the video is at the heart of the case, and it’s before the courts,” he said.
When Martin Baron watched the video again recently, it differed slightly from his memory of it.
“I realized the vulnerability of memory and the value of video,” he wrote in an email. “The differences were relatively minor, but in a murder trial, even the most minor detail can be important.”
Amateur video of alleged police abuse is not a new genre. It goes back at least to March 3, 1991, when a Canadian-born plumber named George Holliday heard sirens just after midnight and took a brand-new Sony Handycam onto his balcony, where he filmed four Los Angeles Police Department officers brutally beating Rodney King by the side of the road. When a Simi Valley, Calif. jury failed to convict any of the officers the following year, riots engulfed Los Angeles, causing 53 deaths and more than $1 billion in property damage.
But the practice of “citizen journalism” has changed drastically since the King tape. For one thing, “tapes” have been replaced with ethereal digital files that can be transported, reproduced, and manipulated much more easily than camcorder cassettes. Holliday had to physically deposit his footage at the office of the TV station KTLA, which broadcast it the next night. Today, he could have uploaded the video to YouTube in a matter of minutes.
The prevalence of mobile phones with sophisticated cameras has also made the likelihood of filming police violence much greater. A 2013 report by Google estimated that 56 per cent of Canadians use a smartphone, and that eight in 10 smartphone owners don’t leave the house without their device.
That growing ubiquity has led to a spate of damaging revelations for police in recent years. Cellphone video helped secure an involuntary manslaughter conviction for a former California transit cop who fatally shot 22-year-old Oscar Grant on the platform of a Bay Area train station on Jan. 1, 2009.
And bystander video seemed to contradict RCMP claims that Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski had run at officers screaming before being fatally Tasered at the Vancouver airport in 2007, leading to perjury charges for the men.
Even the Rob Ford story has benefitted — or suffered, depending on your perspective — from the constant presence of personal recording technology in public places. Many of the mayor’s most damaging episodes of public belligerence have been captured on cellphones, from January’s patois-inflected Steak Queen rant to the original crack video first reported by the Star in May 2013.
In some ways that has sparked a golden age of accountability for public officials. “The existence of videos is an assurance that police officers have to act in a transparent fashion,” said the Yatim family lawyer, Julian Falconer. “They’re behaviour modifiers for the police.”
Some, including retired Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci, have called for police to wear body-mounted cameras in order to increase their accountability. It’s unlikely, however, that these devices would create the same instantaneous transparency as citizen video — police dashboard camera footage of the Michael Eligon shooting was first made public at a coroner’s inquest nearly two years after the fact.
Still, even some who back the use of mobile technology to hold governments accountable warn that putting too much faith in cellphone video can be irresponsible.
“There are more people filming more video and under different circumstances than ever before,” said Matisse Bustos-Hawkes, communications manager for WITNESS, a New York-based organization that supports the use of video to protect human rights. “Witnesses are so plentiful these days that what is sometimes missing from the citizen journalist vocabulary is how to film things safely and ethically.”
“Sometimes things that happen before the camera is rolling — whether it’s an iPhone camera or a film camera — are just as important,” she added. “And that’s not necessarily a deliberate action by a citizen — it could just be the moment when they show up on the scene and decide something’s not right.”
The question of what videos leave out bears heavily on the Yatim case. Martin Baron’s video begins, significantly, about 10 seconds before the officer opens fire on the teen. At first, the viewer sees Yatim standing eerily still, his forearm extended limply, as if holding an ice-cream cone instead of a knife. Then we see the young man begin to shuffle forward drowsily, like a sleepwalker. We hear officers uttering what seems like a perfunctory command to “drop it.” Then pop-pop-pop: three shots that put Yatim on his back. And then six more shots.
Markus Grupp began filming about 30 seconds before Baron. Those 30 seconds of footage show something that can’t help but alter a viewer’s understanding of the shooting. At the beginning of Grupp’s video, Yatim looms in the streetcar’s front doorway, baiting James Forcillo: “You’re a pussy. You’re a pussy. You’re a pussy. You’re a f-----g pussy. You’re a pussy.” Five times he insults the officer whose Glock is drawn and poised.
Then officers begin yelling “drop it” and “drop the knife,” insistently and loudly. A second officer draws his gun. One of the officers says, threateningly, “You take one step in this direction . . .” and then something inaudible. Yatim wanders back a few steps, pauses, and then starts moving back toward the front doors. That’s when the fatal shots were fired.
The first video gives the impression of a much more intemperate, unprovoked shooting; the second shows Yatim acting in what seems to be a reckless manner and ignoring clear orders from police.
Police union president Mike McCormack said that ambiguity was troubling. “That’s why, thank God, we do have a justice system, and people aren’t tried by video, they’re tried by the justice system,” he said.
Still, both clips show the tragic death of a young man much beloved by his family, and much mourned since. Without Baron and Grupp, the public, the police, and the courts would know much less about what happened that night one year ago.
Baron has rarely viewed his footage from beginning to end since he took it. It’s too hard to relive those terrible 90 seconds. “I can’t really watch the video,” he said.
Still, he thinks all of the upheaval — legal, political, and emotional — was worth it.
“I’m glad I did it,” he said. “I’m glad I filmed it.”
July 27 2014 07:00AM
They were stuck in the ice deep in the Canadian Arctic, starving and without hope of rescue when the surviving crew of Sir John Franklin’s expedition abandoned ship and set out on foot across the frozen barren lands.
That was the last time anyone laid eyes on the Erebus and Terror, two iron-plated Royal Navy ships on a mission to discover the Northwest Passage. It was April 1848.
In the 166 years since, clues have turned up across the tundra: hastily scribbled notes left in cairns, silver spoons in Inuit villages, even frozen crew members exhumed from their icy graves. But no one has ever found the ships, whose fate has become one of the most enduring mysteries of the Canadian frontier.
“One hundred and twenty nine men vanished and two ships never found — it’s the largest expedition disaster in history,” said Andrew Campbell, vice president at Parks Canada, which is in charge of the lost wrecks now that they’ve been declared national historic sites — the only ones that can’t be located on a map.
“To this day, if you think about it, it’s absolutely incredible that we’ve not been able to find these two ships. Franklin has never been found; his journals have never been found; a large number of his crewmen have never been found; and the ships have never been found — it’s as if they simply vanished,” said John Geiger, CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, who has personally been hunting Franklin for decades. “You don’t even have the normal evidence of a shipwreck — a bunch of stuff that washed up on shore — you just have these enduring questions.”
This August, an armada of Canadian Arctic vessels equipped with cutting-edge technology is sailing to the last reported location of Franklin’s ships in the most concerted effort yet to find them.
The Wilfrid Laurier, an 83-metre coast guard icebreaker, and HMCS Kingston, a 55-metre navy patrol ship, will be joined by the Martin Bergmann, a 19-metre research vessel operated by the Arctic Research Foundation, and the 117-metre One Ocean Voyager, a private cruise ship to house additional equipment.
The flotilla will be supported by zodiacs, unmanned submarines, a helicopter and state-of-the-art multi-beam and side-scan sonar, deployed together in a carefully choreographed survey of the ocean floor.
Parks Canada is co-ordinating the effort along with the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and they’ve got some high-power and high-profile private sector sponsors including Research In Motion founder Jim Balsillie — who will be personally accompanying the search party.
Balsillie brings the exuberance and impatience of an amateur explorer as well as the competitiveness and financial might of a self-made millionaire.
“The world is going to go crazy if we find something,” he said. “It’s the biggest undiscovered relic in the world.”
Finding Franklin’s ships isn’t just important for Canadians, said Balsillie. The Russians, British and Americans all want to know what happened.
“There’s no question that there’s a race here,” he said. “I have been there and seen vessels from two other nations: the two prime protagonists from the Cold War had research vessels doing work.”
Because Arctic exploration is such a big part of history for these nations and the wrecks are in our backyard, Balsillie says we’ve got to be the ones who find them. It’s a nation-building exercise, a way to continue to stake our claim to the North by reclaiming a part of its past. Or as he puts it: “It’s Indiana Jones with James Bond technology.”
Franklin’s expedition was made up of two British navy bomb ships — built to shell onshore fortresses — both topping out at over 300 tons. The Erebus was named after the region in Greek mythology where the dead first enter Hades and the Terror was christened with the emotion one might have felt when arriving there. While the names were chosen to strike fear in their enemies, they ended up foretelling the fate of their own crews.
The ships had illustrious careers before that last doomed voyage. The Terror saw service in the War of 1812, fighting in the Battle of Baltimore, where the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air inspired the lyrics of the American national anthem. Both ships were later part of the first British expedition to circumnavigate Antarctica.
Retrofitted with iron-plated hulls and steam engines for the Franklin Expedition, the ships set out to find the Northwest Passage in 1845. The Geographic Society’s Geiger said confidence in the voyage’s success was high: one of the most experienced captains in the Royal Navy was setting out with two of its biggest and best-equipped ships to plot a course across the Canadian polar sea and open it up for shipping. Whalers last sighted the two ships as they struck out from Greenland toward Baffin Island.
Three years later, no word had come back and the first search parties were dispatched without success. Soon, a £20,000 reward prompted dozens more seaborne and land expeditions, which ended up mapping much of the North, but only turning up a few silver forks and spoons.
Search parties recorded stories told by Inuit hunters of ships drifting south on ice floes and a group of Europeans resorting to cannibalism before succumbing to starvation, but no other evidence could be found.
More than 10 years later, commissioned by Franklin’s wife to pursue the search, Francis McClintock came upon a rock cairn on King William Island containing a note left by members of the expedition.
“It’s an incredibly important document,” Geiger said. “Rarely has such a horrific story been told in so few words.”
The note first reports on the first two years of the voyage, saying “all well.” But a second note scrawled in the margins of the first added an ominous update a year later.
“The expedition was in great peril, Franklin was dead, the ships had been abandoned and the remaining crew was setting out on foot,” said Geiger. “This is the origin of the terrible death march which led to starvation, cannibalism and poisoning.”
While much of the effort since then has been focused on finding the bodies of the crew — some of which were exhumed in another Geiger-led expedition in the 1980s — this year’s search focuses on the co-ordinates where the crew members say they abandoned the ships.
No one knows how far the ice carried the ships before they sunk, or whether they were crushed in the process, but the research team has taken their last known location and studied ice floe patterns in order to calculate their likely route.
“If you lose your keys, you always want to go back to the last place you saw them,” said Geiger. “For Franklin, that place is the Victoria Strait. That’s where you want to look.”
The High Arctic remains one of the world’s most remote and inhospitable environments, locked in ice year round save for a few weeks in August.
The Victoria Strait, where the ships are believed to be, is one of the last places to open up and the first to freeze back over, turning one of the country’s longest-running searches into a late summer sprint. Once in position, the flotilla will have to work around the clock until the ice begins to close up again. While simple access is the first barrier, once there, the search party still has a legion of obstacles to surmount.
“The ocean is an incredible cloaking device,” said Rear Adm. John Newton, commander of Canada’s Atlantic Maritime Forces and himself a lifelong Arctic explorer. “It makes Malaysian airliners disappear.”
Deep Arctic water requires powerful sonar to reach the bottom, while silt makes the job even more difficult by hampering the signal. The navy will be using a new autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) built in British Columbia that will dive deep beneath the ships and employ a high-resolution synthetic aperture sonar made in Newfoundland and an acoustic homing-system manufactured in Nova Scotia.
The sonars will be run in straight lines back and forth through the search area — a pattern Newton says is “like mowing a lawn.” The information collected by the AUV is collected by computers on-board the ships and plotted into a full-colour map of the ocean floor capable of detecting small objects and able to distinguish between a rock and a boiler.
“I have some faith that we will find one of the ships in reasonably good condition,” said Geiger. “But the worst case scenario would be finding matchsticks. Obviously the boiler would be there, but we might have a severely broken up wreck.”
Polar ice has scraped the bottom clean in some areas, especially in pinch points where the ice piles up, Geiger said. But other, deeper and more open areas could very well be untouched, leaving the ships in pristine condition.
The expedition organizers take hope from the recent discovery of an incredibly well preserved ship in similar waters. In 2010, a Parks Canada expedition discovered HMS Investigator, one of the rescue ships sent to search for Franklin and his men and later abandoned in the ice off Banks Island.
The ship’s copper-plated hull was intact, while leather shoes and muskets were preserved by silt buildup on deck. Unlike shipwrecks in the Caribbean, where barnacles quickly grow and sea life moves in, the cold water of the Arctic provides a perfect preserving agent, leaving things in remarkable states, even after more than a century on the bottom.
“There may be human remains on board; there may be daguerreotypes (early photographs) taken by Franklin and his crew,” said Geiger. “There is the possibility that somehow there are messages or information written and preserved in watertight tubes.”
“It’s more than the thrill of finding a diorama of Victorian exploration. What you have here is a potential storehouse of information about the Franklin expedition and its destruction.”
It may be hard for some Canadians to believe, Geiger says, but much of the Arctic Ocean has never been mapped. Because so few ships travel through the treacherous and mostly frozen waters, very little is known about what the bottom looks like and where the safe maritime routes can be found.
“It’s a big unknown area with single paths charted in and out,” said Rear Adm. Newton. “The navy still follows sounding lines from the 1800s — we need to broaden those corridors.”
The short open-water season has forced previous searches to be shots in the dark. But climate change has been opening up the area for longer stretches in recent years, allowing for a more systematic approach.
The federal government started by sending out a single ship in 2008 and has sent out similar search expeditions each year since. These searches have produced detailed charts of over 1,200 square kilometres of seabed, definitively ruling out large areas where Franklin’s ships won’t be found. But this year’s expedition, with its beefed-up force and experimental technology, will cover more ground than all previous expeditions combined.
“We are inheritors of the British Arctic exploration legacy,” says Geiger. “Franklin’s disappearance in the central Arctic and the subsequent searches are really the reason Canada can claim sovereignty over the Arctic archipelago.”
Now, the dream of a navigable Arctic shipping route is quickly becoming reality. In the past, adventure seekers in yachts would pull up at the edge of the ice and hope that a brief opening would allow them through. Now, a wide channel opens reliably each year for up to six weeks. Last fall, the Nordic Orion, a 225-metre cargo ship hauled 15,000 tons of coal from Vancouver to Finland, becoming the first commercial carrier to pass through the Northwest Passage.
This increased traffic also raises issues of security — a challenge the Harper government has made a priority by ordering eight state-of-the-art Arctic patrol ships. While the navy waits for the new ships to be built, it has stepped up its Arctic patrols and become an enthusiastic supporter of the search for the Erebus and Terror, which in turn provides training for crew members and detailed maps.
In this way, the search for the ships is actually becoming a way to complete Franklin’s mission of charting a commercial route through the northern sea — more than 160 years after he started.
July 26 2014 03:09PM
FC Dallas (8-7-5) at Vancouver (6-4-9), 5 p.m.
July 25 2014 06:20PM
The Vancouver Canucks signed their first-round pick in the 2014 NHL Draft to undisclosed contract terms on Friday.
July 25 2014 05:19PM
The Vancouver Canucks signed first-round pick Jake Virtanen on Friday.
July 25 2014 05:09PM
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) -- The Vancouver Canucks signed first-round pick Jake Virtanen on Friday.
July 25 2014 04:55PM
VANCOUVER - The Vancouver Canucks have signed sixth-overall draft pick Jake Virtanen, according to Virtanen's Twitter feed.
"Such an honour to sign with the Vancouver Canucks!," Virtanen posted Friday. "I'd like to thank everybody who's helpe...
July 25 2014 04:48PM
Vancouver, B.C. - Vancouver Canucks General Manager Jim Benning announced today that the club has signed forward Jake Virtanen.
Virtanen, 17, collected 71 points (45-26-71) and 100 penalty minutes in 2013.14 with the Calgary Hitmen of the Weste...
July 25 2014 02:18PM
Jake Virtanen, the sixth player taken in the 2014 NHL Draft, announced Friday on his official Twitter account that he has signed with the Vancouver Canucks.
"Such an honour to sign with the Vancouver Canucks!," he wrote on his Twitter feed. "I'...
July 25 2014 09:56AM
Vancouver Whitecaps coach Carl Robinson and his team have been fined by Major League Soccer because of the confrontation with Real Salt Lake last weekend.
