Sporting Madness

Yesterday night, the Canucks fired general manager Dave Nonis . Owner Francesco Aquilini told the Vancouver Province 's Ben Kuzma the decision was largely due to missing the playoffs. "I think this important change in leadership is critical to the future of the team and the direction we need to take," he said. "It's not acceptable to our fans or to us as owners that our team isn't in the playoffs." Aquilini also seemed to indicate that the defence-first style favoured by Nonis and coach Alain Vigneault didn't meet with his approval. "As owners we made a commitment to deliver the kind of hockey our fans deserve," he said. I've thought about this overnight, and I'm still conflicted. On the one hand, Nonis' teams missed the playoffs two out of his three years: on the other hand, they fell short by small margins each time. This year, a lot of the problems were due to injuries to the defence corps, which on paper at least looked like...

Well, the Canucks continued their slide right out of the playoffs yesterday, losing their sixth game of the last seven to the Edmonton Oilers. Combined with Nashville's earlier win over the St. Louis Blues, the loss meant that Vancouver is now eliminated from playoff contention. Every suspicious death requires a post-mortem examination, so here's my take on the anatomy of a collapse. Head: Dave Nonis As James Mirtle wrote today , one of the big problems with this team was how they were built and the almost-complete lack of scoring depth. Responsibility for that has to fall on the GM's desk. Granted, he hasn't had all that much room to work so far, and has made some nice moves (Luongo, Willie Mitchell and Aaron Miller come to mind), but he hasn't done much of anything to improve the offense. Matt Pettinger was a decent trade-deadline pickup, and may be able to contribute offensively next season, but he isn't the whole solution. Nonis' draft record is also spo...

Funnily enough, the Canucks have kept up their string of incomprehensible play lately. Things were looking bleak around the trade deadline while the team was hovering on the playoff bubble, and some demands for the head of general manager Dave Nonis were even heard after he failed to do anything more significant than swapping Matts. The team promptly continued their slump, scoring only five times in three games and recording only 10 shots against woeful Chicago, which captain Markus Naslund accurately described as "embarrassing." Since then, they've put up some better results, are now inside the playoff picture looking out instead of the converse, and could take the Northwest Division lead tonight with a win over Minnesota. It's hard to tell if this string of results flows from better plays or merely better bounces, though. Iain MacIntyre of the Vancouver Sun nailed it after the Canucks scraped out a win against Dallas last Saturday. "Seventy-two games into th...

As those who don't live under rocks (or south of the 49th parallel) assuredly know already, Tuesday was the NHL trade deadline. They should go ahead and declare it a national holiday already: it makes much more sense than "Family Day", and everyone knows no self-respecting Canadian actually got any work done during the day(particularly because TSN streamed their trade deadline coverage online and got over a million streaming viewers ). In fact, James Duthie referred to the day as " Canada's Unofficial National Holiday. " Anyways, plenty of interesting deadline deals went down. Far better minds than I, including Stephen Brunt , Tim Wharnsby and James Mirtle , have extensively analyzed what went down. There's one team that I thought deserved special attention for their moves, though: the always-dangerous Colorado Avalanche, who added Peter Forsberg, Adam Foote and Ruslan Salei, but didn't even make Wharnsby's list of deadline winners . The Forsber...