Early Evening Headshots: March 11th

I like this .gif because it makes me imagine Roberto Luongo as a Bond villain.
Oh by the way, if Luongo were a Bond villain, his Bond villain name would be "Number 1" obviously.

Today at our merry hockey nerd blog (for merry hockey nerds!) we tried to forget Sunday night’s embarrassing loss to the Wild, considered the benefits of putting a waiver claim in on defenseman Steve Montador, analyzed Jordan Schroeder’s Chicago re-assignment and rambled on about Alain Vigneault’s strengths and weaknesses as a head coach.

Click past the jump for more Canucks news, more criticism of the team and moar Giants!

Interesting take from Cam Charron on the need for an elite piece that might galvanize Vancouver’s bucket of quality possession players. Pretty much Cam just wants to see Mike Gillis make some bold moves. [Legion of Blog]

Rob the Hockey guy makes some good points about the Cody Hodgson trade, which he still wishes hadn’t happened. I’m still okay with it because Hodgson’s a minus posession player better suited to putting up points on a losing team than helping a good team win games. I also still think the Zack Kassian gamble is a reasonable one, despite Kassian’s lack of production over the past month. I might elaborate on this tomorrow. [Rob the Hockey Guy]

Speaking of the Cody Hodgson spectre, it rears its head in Jason Botchford’s take today about Jordan Schroeder’s re-assignment. [The White Towel]

Also from Botch, he wrote the following today: "The defence has been suspect, though better than most people think," quick everybody rush to Twitter and yell at him to watch the games! [The Province]

Bure’s Triple Deke compares Jason Garrison to Adrian Aucoin. [Bure’s Triple Deke]

Alain Vigneault tells Elliott Pap that the Canucks are more or less where he thought they’d be at the mid-way point of the season. Weird that Vigneault isn’t panicking, it’s almost like he understands that the team has been pretty good at evens and has faith that the goaltending and power-play are too good to continue to struggle as they have over the past week… [Vancouver Sun]

Roberto Luongo sounds eager to get back into the Canucks net, and he’ll get a chance to do just that on Tuesday in Columbus. Also "Number One" is the best. Watch him get hot and start like seven of the next ten games. [The Province]

Nolan Kelly thinks Mike Gillis has got a free pass in the Vancouver market. To prove it he builds a pro and con list to make and says the con list is longer than the pro list. To his credit he doesn’t make any definitive statement about this, just observes that Mike Gillis’ record isn’t quite as blemish free as you might think. That said, some of his cons are debatable and also a "con" like signing Marco Sturm to a one year contract isn’t nearly as big a deal as the whole "keeping the Sedins, Kesler, Burrows, Edler, Bieksa and Hamhuis for below market value in a salary cap system" thing. Interesting take here though. [The Province]

From Canucks practice today, Elliott Pap tells us that Chris Higgins is likely to get an extended look in the middle. Also Chris Tanev wasn’t available for comment as he was recieving treatment after blocking a Clayton Stoner shot with his hand in Sunday night’s game. [Vancouver Sun]

So with Bieksa still on the shelf and Chris Tanev possibly injured the Canucks might be down to a grand total of zero blue-liners with right-handed shots for Tuesday’s game in Columbus. So should the Canucks put in a waiver claim on right-shooting defenseman Steve Montador? We mentioned this already, I know, but Harrison Mooney wrote it up as well so read his opinion on the matter too! [Pass it to Bulis]

Finally, from Canucks prospect Jeremy Price (whose Colgate Raiders were swept out of the playoffs last week):

So the Chicago Wolves will be adding another intriguing prospect to their ranks in Price, a puck moving defenseman who really upped his goal rate as a senior while captaining Colgate’s team in the ECAC this past season. He was our 18th ranked Canucks prospect this past August.