DUCKS ALWAYS A TEST
Canucks’ lacklustre effort Thursday overshadowed by 2019 tournament heading back to B.C.
Canucks fail, 3-1
Owing to exciting new deadlines, we’re thrilled to offer a special musings column off the Canucks’ game, proving once again you can never get too much of an average thing.
With all due respect to the Canucks and the Ducks, the big news to emerge from Thursday was the earlier announcement that Vancouver and Victoria will host the 2018-19 world junior championship. It was last held in Vancouver in 2006 and if you’ve never seen the tournament, it represents a singularly Canadian event. TSN has cranked up the hype machine around the WJC over the last decade, but this event doesn’t need the hard sell.
I’ve covered six of them — the first one in Red Deer in 1995, the last one in Ottawa in 2009 — and they’ve all provided lasting memories and indelible images. The stacked Canadian team of 1995 — hello, Ed Jovanovski — came in a lockout year and went through the tournament undefeated. There was Roberto Luongo in Winnipeg in ’99, the late Luc Bourdon in Vancouver in ’06, John Tavares in Ottawa in ’09 and the ’05 Canadian team with Sidney Crosby, Patrice Bergeron, Shea Weber and so many others, the greatest team in WJC history.
The 2019 team will have its own story to tell, but they’ll also be connected to the greater Canadian story of this tournament. It stretches back to Gretzky in ’78, runs through Crosby to Connor McDavid and includes virtually every great Canadian player over the last five decades.
They’re all connected to this tournament, as are we.
It’s absurd when you think about it, but after the ’78 WJC in Montreal, it was eight years before the WJC came back to Canada. Then it was five years. Then it was four. Then it finally dawned on the IIHF the tournament was a licence to print money when it was held in Canada.
Since ’06 it has been in Canada five times. It’s headed to Montreal and Toronto this year, Buffalo the next year, then back to Vancouver. The IIHF now says it has the dough to cover travel and insurance for NHL players at the Olympics. Draw your own conclusions there.
In keeping with the WJC theme, it’s instructive to note so many of the players from the ’05 tournament in Grand Forks, N.D., came to define this era of the NHL. In addition to Crosby et al, the Canadian team had Corey Perry, Ryan Getzlaf and Brent Seabrook. That year, the Russians had Alex Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin. The American team featured Phil Kessel and Ryan Suter.
Bergeron, Weber, Perry, Getzlaf, Seabrook, Suter and old pal Ryan Kesler also came from the ’03 draft, which is generally regarded as the best draft in NHL history.
You’d have a hard time proving it by the Ducks’ 3-1 win on Thursday, but those players are finally starting to showing their age after dominating the NHL for more than a decade. Kesler is 32, Perry and Getzlaf are both 31 and there are a lot of miles on those engines.
The Ducks are still an elite team, but the window is closing.
Finally, how will the faithful remember Ryan Miller?
He was brought in to keep the Canucks competitive while they were rebuilding, even if they never admitted to rebuilding. On that level, he didn’t succeed, but the Nux could have played Glenn Hall and Jacques Plante together the last three years and it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Thursday night, in fact, was a perfect microcosm of Miller’s time here. He was outstanding in the first period, stopping all 10 shots as the Ducks owned the puck and the offensive zone. Jakob Silfverberg then scored early in the second and that was basically the game. After an encouraging outing against Minnesota on Tuesday night, the Canucks were back to playing their “structured” game, which is also their “losing” game. A late rally made things marginally interesting, but you generally don’t win in the NHL playing for five minutes.
Miller has tried, but he’s also 36 and it seems like his time here will be done at the end of this season. It’s unfortunate he never connected with this market because he’s an intelligent, insightful soul. But Miller was always an awkward fit for this team, the wrong goalie at the wrong time.