Sporting Madness

Wow. It wasn't all that long ago that a certain over-optimistic homer (or former-home-r?) wrote about the Vancouver Canucks making a run at the Northwest Division title. Not only did that fail to materialize, but the opposite happened: they promptly went into a slump and are now on the outside of the playoff picture looking in. To squeeze into the playoffs, the Canucks now likely have to run the table and hope Nashville drops points against either St. Louis or Chicago. The Vancouver Province does a nice job of breaking down the potential scenarios here (except if Chicago and Edmonton both pass the Canucks, they'd finish 11th, not 10th). Tonight's game against Edmonton could decide things one way or another, and the interesting part is the staggered time zones. The Nashville-St. Louis and Calgary-Minnesota games both start at 8 ET, while the Canucks don't take the ice for another two and a half hours. As the Globe 's Matthew Sekeres points out , there will probabl...

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...

The NHL announced today that Anaheim Ducks defenceman Chris Pronger would be suspended for eight games for his stomp on Ryan Kesler of the Vancouver Canucks. Outstanding CKNW and Canucks TV colour man Tom Larscheid nailed it towards the end of the clip, calling it "A deliberate play by Pronger just to stomp on Kesler with his skate." In my mind at least, this was out-and-out dirty, right up there with the infamous Chris Simon on Jarkko Ruutu play. Of course, Simon's a fringe player, so the full book (a 30-game suspension) got thrown at him: Pronger wouldn't even have been suspended without the NHL suspiciously finding a "new angle" after they'd already ruled it was inconclusive. According to Pronger, the league told him Thursday night there would be no suspension, but then re-reviewed the tape on Friday and came up with the new punishment. I don't see how they deemed it inconclusive in the first place: even the original camera angle was far bette...