Today is the last day in August. Not that I have anything against the summer, but you can’t help but be stoked to have this month behind you. It leaves us with just one more month in the offseason; one full of training camps, preseason games, and all the banter that comes with them. After that, it’s time for hockey! 

Especially in a year where Vancouver has been stupid hot, and with the exception of this weekend, stupid dry, I’m more than okay with moving on from the summer. While we continue to wait, however, lets look at a few of the questions that stumbled into the CA Mailbag this week:

There’s a case to be made for him – he’s top 3, if not first, in every goaltending stat the Canucks have. He was a franchise face for several years. Even if his final contract in Vancouver didn’t turn out as planned and his departure was a little rocky, you can make a case for him as one of the dominant Canucks players ever and one of the most-liked personalities the franchise has ever seen.

But, is that enough? I think the events that follow over the next few years will define that. Does his return to the Panthers make Florida his “Team #1” in the perception of the global hockey fanbase? Do the Canucks finally win the Stanley Cup and make the run in 2011 look insignificant? Does Ryan Miller go 82-0-0 with a 0.9996 SV% this year? Who knows, really. There’s a lot of time to figure this out.

If I had a gun to my head telling me to make a decision now, though, I’d probably do it.

This has already been answered on Twitter dot com, but for the sake of putting it on a public platform – there will be more PCS content coming out in the near future, including some tweaking and some looks back. I won’t speak for it because PCS isn’t my baby, but from the sounds if it, we’ll see som exciting stuff.

One or both of the goalies. No question. The easiest way to take a fringe team to an undeserved spot in the standings is an inflated save percentage. A guy who takes 200 shots at 10% going up to 15% is going to add ten goals to your team in his “big year”. A goalie who faces 2000 shots at a 0.905 and ends up at 0.925 will remove 40 goals against. 

Both Miller and Markstrom were below the league average SV% last year. If either of them takes the starting role and performs at a borderline-elite level, that could make all the difference.

Too early to say. There are many people who dislike some of Benning’s decisions, but he has to catastrophically fail at the expectations management set upon him before they’ll flat out fire him. We don’t know when (not if, because every GM eventually hits that stage) that will be, so we don’t know what the talent pool, internal or external, is going to be.

Let’s focus on ways to improve the scenery around the statue before trying to tear it down.

Not to be a buzzkill, but it’ll likely be somebody insignificant; either a roster player who is on the verge of being waived and claimed at the end of camp will be traded for an insignificant prospect/conditional pick, or the Canucks will pull the reverse to grab somebody else’s fringe player.

The first trades are always the most boring.