Hang Ten! Canucks to retire Pavel Bure’s No. 10 on November 2
By Cam Charron
10 years ago
The date makes sense, really.
Pavel Bure’s iconic Number 10 will be raised to the rafters at the Rog on Saturday, November 2nd when the Canucks host the Toronto Maple Leafs. Bure doesn’t have a familiar legacy with any current Leafs, nor did any of his best moments come against them, but this is during Hockey Night in Canada’s feature game starting at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, meaning all of Canada gets to sit in front of the tube and gawk at what a wonderful hockey player Pavel Bure was.
Vancouver, B.C. – The Vancouver Canucks announced today that Pavel Bure’s number will be retired on Saturday, November 2nd when the Canucks host the Toronto Maple Leafs. Bure’s number 10 will become the fourth retired number in franchise history joining Stan Smyl’s number 12, Trevor Linden’s number 16 and Markus Naslund’s number 19.The ceremony will air on CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada beginning at 4:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST). The club first announced plans to honour Bure by retiring his number during the annual ‘Canucks Summer Summit’ season ticket holder event July 23, 2013.
Speaking of releases, here is Bure’s career highlight video:
Patrick Johnston over at the Province compiled a snazzy gallery of Bure’s best pictures, yet for some reason didn’t include the one we used, the famous hockey card of Bure in rollerblades. I was also one of the lucky kids in Vancouver with one of these, before my parents moved and threw it out:
By this point, we’ve gotten all the “retirement – should they or shouldn’t they?” arguments out of the way, but it’s clear that enough time has passed to heal all wounds between Bure and the Canucks. Between 1992 and 1998, the Canucks had one of the best players in the game playing for them, and it’s largely for his contributions to the Canucks that Bure found himself enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame. He became the first Hall of Fame player to play the majority of his National Hockey League games with Vancouver.
Hopefully, they bring a lot of the guys from those mid-1990s teams back out, including former Toronto Maple Leafs (and Bure’s teammates) Jyrki Lumme and Alexander Mogilny**. One of our Leafs Nation writers happened to be a huge Bure fan growing up for some reason (because Bure is awesome) wrote a longish spiel about how great Pavel is, so you can imagine he must be giddy at being able to watch the Canucks “hang 10” before his bedtime.
So set your iCalendars, and forget that ugly moment of existence when Bure wore No. 96, or any memory you have of Bure as a New York Ranger. He was never those things.
* – I think
** – Garry Valk isn’t invited
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