Canucks Report

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming. The Vancouver Canucks—carrying their usual, cocksure swirl of complete unpredictability—are back playing games into May. Questions of Roberto Luongo’s mental acuity abound, and we don’t know which goaltender will start Game 1.

Has it really been a whole year? Has anything changed? Where are we?

We recall last April, when this team limped into the playoffs with no time or any bother for the regular season, and hardly much more for the lowly first round. The Stanley Cup (Final) hangover was real and it drained the city and the team of any emotion for anything that wasn’t the real fix: Conference Semi’s and onward. It was an interesting tactical approach—to apparently not give a damn, even when heading into the playoffs—and in hindsight the results were unsurprising.

When you get to the end of most long, multi-installment film franchises you’re usually treated to a clumsy pile of recycled, familiar elements that are trotted out to replicate previous successes.

You’ve seen this movie before, you say to yourself, two or three times, and now the whole thing is just stale. It leaves a sour taste for fans of the franchise, because it suggests the peak has passed — with the best of it gone forever.

You probably see where this is going.

The Vancouver Canucks are once again nonchalantly idling down the stretch, meandering toward the postseason like it’s a private members club to which they feel they have exclusive entry rights, regardless of how poorly they’re dressed or how foul they’re acting on the way up to the front door.

“We’re from the Northwest Division, step aside.”

There’s nothing to tell them to act otherwise. They’re winning games and coasting through long stretches of the season, again.

You have to wonder how much Vancouver Canucks President and General Manager Mike Gillis identifies with Kevin Spacey’s character in House of Cards. The on-ice product of his hockey team is at once impressive, disappointingly ugly, and hinting at inevitable disaster.

Five games shy of the halfway mark of the shortened post-lockout season and his team is just about exactly where it should be: Third in the Western Conference and first in its division, streaking toward home-ice advantage in the first round of the playoffs.

Ten games into the season and the following two statements are true simultaneously: Buffalo Sabres’ winger Thomas Vanek is on pace for 99 points in 48 games, and the Vancouver Canucks are on pace for a 67-point season and another easy Northwest Division title.

The second trend line is about as useful as the first, meaning they’re both fairly useless.

Vanek’s trajectory would see him churning out a level of production unseen since the days when Wayne Gretzky was tossing out 180-plus point seasons like he had six or seven of them taking up room in his garage. The Canucks, meanwhile, would raise no eyebrows at all if they met expectations and casually captured the Northwest. Which they will, barring disaster.

And yet, on merit, it’s all a bit upside down.