Canucks Report

If there are silver linings perhaps the biggest one is this: There’s just enough time to fly Ryan Kesler to Lourdes and back before the Canucks next game on Wednesday night. If opening weekend is any indication though, they might plunk him on the wrong flight and forget the return ticket.

We jest. To a point. 

The sky is not falling, the goalie controversy is overblown, and this team is still too talented to be taken down by some (lots of) lockout rust. But shortened seasons are unforgiving to late-comers, and while the sample size is small and the panic has come comically early there’s a tiny margin for error this season before it will quickly be too late. The Canucks have already lost out on three of four points when they need to be clipping steadily along at the opposite pace to guarantee a playoff spot.

Yes, they’re already in a hole. Absurd as that fact is.

Hockey Night in Canada announcer Bob Cole has never worked a game so dull or so meaningless that his natural excitability couldn't spruce it up a notch or two or twelve. But in a 2011 playoff series between the Boston Bruins and Montreal Canadiens he bumped into the opposite problem: An overload of events so exciting and so dramatic that all he could muster was "Everything is happening!"

It's an infamous call among hockey fans — often cited and hashtagged on twitter during extremely busy days on the NHL newswire — and it will be put to the test over the coming days and weeks of a shortened season and compressed NHL schedule. 

News of gradual progress in the NHL collective bargaining talks continue to seep out, and one of the spicier nuggets this morning is the leagues proposal to grant two compliance buyouts per team prior to the start of the 2013-14 season. If that comes to pass the coming off season will be a frenzy of page-turning and slate-cleaning, league-wide. 

And despite the consternation in these parts about a dropping salary cap limit and a Canucks team already up against it with only 12 roster players signed (not including Roberto Luongo), the Canucks could actually enter that frenzy with over $20-million dollars in cap space. 

Impossible? Hardly. 

According to James Mirtle at The Globe and Mail, the Canucks have $55.4-million committed for 2013-14, with the salary cap expected to drop to $60-million at the lowest. That would leave Vancouver with $4.6-million in cap space. 

There comes a moment in the growth and maturity of something — person, sports franchise, anything — when idealism gives way to reality, and some degree of acceptance and understanding kicks in.

Call it the “this is it” tipping point: When the something in question stops fretting about what it isn’t, hasn’t accomplished yet, or what it doesn’t like about itself, and more or less accepts what it already is.

For the Vancouver Canucks and Pavel Bure, the “this is it”.  The tipping point is here. 

With his entry into the Hockey Hall of Fame on Monday, the franchise's historically rocky relationship with 'The Russian Rocket' — its greatest pure talent — has been stripped, baring naked the shoddy excuses that are continually trotted out to prop him up as a player not entirely worth being celebrated.