Canucks fans explained

If this doesn’t perfectly sum up the essence of Canucks’ nation, I don’t know what does.

Top tier goalie on a team that has in the past resorted to Toronto Maple Leafs cast-offs? Boooooooo.

Coach takes you to top of the league two years in a row, and within one win of the Cup? #fireAV.

Selke winning centre hampered by a pretty serious injury? Trade him!

Yup, that’s about as irrational as you can get. But again, I take no credit for the idea. It is one of the two things I learned listening to our very own Thomas Drance on the Nation Radio podcast this week. The other one is that Thom is a very nice young man. Seriously.

Thom’s point on the show was that forty-two years of futility will breed a certain amount of desperation in a fanbase, and that leads to irrationality. Based on the comments I’ve seen in the last two months, the most egregious of which are paraphrased above, I couldn’t agree more. And I don’t even listen to the local sports radio call-in shows!

The beauty of the statement is its simplicity. This town is hockey mad, and really just wants to win. But let’s not kid ourselves, the same is true around the league. Granted, the degree to which it is true varies.

Ellen Etchingham posted a piece on Kovalchuk that in one elegant sentence captured the essence of NHL hockey: "Hockey respects skill and it treasures toughness, but it loves only winning."

So yes, Canucks fans have been deprived of that outlet for so long that the desperation is breeding irrationality at a fevered pace.

But I have to say, I still prefer that, to living somewhere where this could happen:

No comment.

Finally, it appears that "shot blocking" is the latest scourge to ravage the NHL playoffs. So much so, that the New Jersey Devils have threatened to deploy the "shoot for the face" strategy:

Or maybe Shanahan can just give out a 25 game suspension to the next guy that blocks a shot…