Previewing the Canucks and Senators with Dany Heatley Speedwagon

The Canucks continue their endless road trip tonight, taking on the surprisingly hot Ottawa Senators at 7:30 p.m. Eastern/4:30 Pacific. To set up the game, I spoke to Deadspin commenter, Twitterer and blogger extraordinaire Dany Heatley Speedwagon, who writes about the Senators at Scarlett Ice. For the funniest game preview you’ll read anywhere (*may not actually be true, depending on your sense of humour), you might as well jump!

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Tags: Alex Burrows, Daniel Sedin, Dany Heatley Speedwagon, Henrik Sedin, interviews, Ottawa Senators, previews, road trips

It’s a long way to the top

The Canucks have been one of the league’s hottest teams recently, led in particular by stellar play from the Sedin twins and Alex Burrows. Henrik Sedin continues to make his case as a Hart Trophy candidate, and the team’s also getting extremely solid performances from the likes of Christian Ehrhoff and Alex Edler despite an injury-plagued defensive corps. When things are going this well, teams just seem to find a way to win; despite falliing behind 3-0 to the Toronto Maple Leafs in the first period of the first game of a brutal road trip Saturday and pulling Roberto Luongo, the Canucks clawed their way back with Andrew Raycroft in net, preventing Toronto from scoring another goal and notching five straight goals of their own en route to their seventh consecutive victory.

Those kinds of hot streaks can’t last forever, though. Four out of those seven wins were by one goal, and there were signs of weakness even in the lopsided victories. The NHL has enough parity and a long enough season that most games can go either way, depending on a few bounces. You can’t just go through the schedule checking off the teams below you in the standings as guaranteed victories; in fact, as I wrote earlier this season, one of the Canucks’ frequent issues has been been competing hard against the lesser teams.
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Tags: Alex Burrows, Andrew Raycroft, Daniel Sedin, Henrik Sedin, road trips, Roberto Luongo, staying medium, streaks

United

(Quick side note; I’ll be attending tomorrow night’s Canucks Tweetup at the Lamplighter. If you’re going to be there, make sure to say hi; I’ll probably be the only one with a blond mustache, leather jacket and red/navy old Canucks third jersey!)

This Alex Burrows – Stephane Auger saga just continues to spiral. In terms of Vancouver versus the league, the NHL’s already come out with their “nothing to see here, move along” line, and it doesn’t look like much of anything further will happen on that front. The Canucks versus CBC story is much more interesting, though, and it hasn’t quite wrapped up yet.
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Tags: Alex Burrows, controversy, Hockey Night In Canada, media, off-ice issues, Ron MacLean, Stephane Auger

Dropping like flies

As the Canucks push towards the playoffs, one thread has remained relatively constant in recent years; they seem to go through defencemen more quickly than Don Cherry changes suits. It’s not that the Canucks tend to suffer an abnormally high rate of injuries overall; as this post James Mirtle wrote last year shows, they ranked 14th overall over the last four years in man-games lost to injury. It just seems those injuries all tend to come on defence, and that pattern’s repeating again this year, where they’re actually tied for third in man-games lost.
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Stanley Cup headed for Vancouver, winds up in Toronto

This is pretty awesome. Reuters reports that Stanley Cup custodian Mike Bolt checked the trophy in at a New Jersey airport Sunday en route to Vancouver for a charity event, but Air Canada staff screwed up and sent it to Toronto by mistake. No word yet on if Brian Burke was involved, but who would put it past him?
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Tags: Brian Burke, hockey follies, Stanley Cup, Toronto Maple Leafs

Previewing the Canucks and Oilers

Tonight’s game (7:00 p.m. PT, Rogers Sportsnet Pacific) against the Oilers should be an interesting one. Vancouver’s been playing reasonably well, and demolished Pittsburgh on Saturday, but continues to be surrounded by a storm of off-ice controversy around AugerGate and Ron MacLean’s hit job on Alex Burrows. Meanwhile, Edmonton’s been in a horrible slump lately, and David Staples writes that the whole team seems to be mailing it in at times. What’s wrong with the Oilers, whose fault is it, how can it be changed and will it be changed tonight? To get an idea, I talked to Benjamin Massey, who writes for the excellent SB Nation Oilers blog The Copper and Blue (and happens to run a Canadian soccer site as well). My questions and his answers are below.
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Tags: Benjamin Massey, Edmonton Oilers, interviews, opponents, previews

Don’t disregard Daniel

Many in Vancouver have supported Henrik and Daniel Sedin for the past few years, but there was a time when they were widely derided as busts. Even after they started to excel, they still didn’t get a lot of hype outside of Vancouver; one of the few exceptions is this piece James Mirtle wrote last spring about how the twins had quietly turned into elite forwards. Despite growing recognition of the Sedins, there was still considerable debate about just how much they were worth this offseason; I argued that their consistent point production made them two of the league’s most valuable players, and I was quite happy when the Canucks locked them up for five years and $30.5 million each, which gave them only the 35th and 36th highest cap hits in the league.
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Tags: Alex Burrows, Daniel Sedin, Hart Trophy, Henrik Sedin, MVP, statistics

Wrapping up Burrows/Auger

In the end, the Alex Burrows – Stephane Auger incident doesn’t seem to have amounted to much. Burrows was fined $2,500 but not suspended, and Auger escaped punishment thanks to NHL discipline czar Colin Campbell’s conclusion that Burrows’ claims couldn’t be verified. However, many of the key issues the incident brought up still haven’t been resolved.
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Tags: Alex Burrows, league issues, referees, Stephane Auger

Burrows claims ref is out to get him

A bizarre subplot emerged from the Canucks’ 3-2 loss to Nashville tonight, with Alex Burrows claiming [Jason Botchford, The Province] referee Stephane Auger has a personal vendetta against him. Burrows scored both of the Canucks’ goals, but was called for 16 minutes in penalties and was in the box when Nashville’s winning goal was scored. At least two of the penalties were certainly debatable.
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Tags: Alex Burrows, controversies, Nashville Predators, penalties, refs, Stephane Auger, suspensions

The small things…

One of the interesting elements of hockey is how it’s not just about the highlight-reel dekes or show-stopping saves. For every big moment, there are plenty of important small ones, such as movement off the puck, finishing checks and blocking shots. To me, that seemed to be the story of last night’s 7-3 thumping [Sean Zandberg, Nucks Misconduct] of the Columbus Blue Jackets.
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Tags: Alex Burrows, Christian Ehrhoff, Daniel Sedin, fundamentals, Henrik Sedin, hot streaks, Kevin Bieksa, Shane O'Brien