VIRTANEN’S PLAY COULD HELP BOOST CANUCKS’ FORTUNES
Club’s one strength this coming season may be its depth at the forward positions
With the baseball playoffs starting, we offer our own fall classic: the Monday morning musings and meditations on the world of sports.
It’s to be expected Travis Green ■ would soft-sell Jake Virtanen’s pre-season for public, and maybe Jake’s, consumption but if Green and the entire organization aren’t ecstatic about Virtanen/2017, they’re missing a crucial point.
To review, the Canucks have three lottery picks in their system: Virtanen, Olli Juolevi and Elias Pettersson. For this rebuild to work, all three have to become impact players. If that happens, you can start to see a road out for the Canucks. If it doesn’t, the rebuild is set back three years.
The problem was Virtanen didn’t look like a sixth-overall pick in his first two seasons as a pro. At least his developmental arc wasn’t consistent with a player taken that high in the draft. That doesn’t mean he was doomed to failure. But when you’re drafted in that slot and you put up a nine-goal, 19-point season in the minors, there is legitimate cause for concern.
We still don’t know what Virtanen, who just turned 21, will become. But if he turns into a 25-goal, power forward — something along the lines of Anaheim’s Jakob Silfverberg — it changes a lot of things for the Canucks.
That said, it’s hard to envision
■ how the Canucks will be competitive this season but the one possibility is Green wrings every last drop out of this team and emerges as an Adams Trophy candidate.
The Canucks, after all, appear to have one strength. Or maybe it registers as a strength because there are so many weaknesses in their lineup but these Canucks do have some depth.
As they’re currently constructed, Brandon Sutter is essentially their fourth-line centre and they have nine forwards — the Sedins, Sven Baertschi, Loui Eriksson, Sam Gagner, Markus Granlund, Bo Horvat, Thomas Vanek and Sutter — who have 20-goal potential.
Throw in Brock Boeser and the aforementioned Virtanen and Green should have the ability to roll four lines and play mix-andmatch upfront.
It likely won’t be enough to carry them to the playoffs but at least it’s something on which he can build an identity.
“That’s what I’d like to see out of this group,” Green says. “I want internal competition. I want the 12th forward to push the first forward.”
I’m not a soccer expert,
■ although I play one on these pages, but if Carl Robinson isn’t the MLS coach-of-the-year, something is wrong.
The Brad Wait Memorial
■
Tournament exceeded all expectations in its initial staging at Seymour on Friday. The final tally won’t be known for a couple of days but a sizable cheque will be turned over to the North Shore Hospice in the name of our friend, Brad.
If you’ve never had to visit a friend or family member in a hospice, consider yourself lucky. If you have, you know they do heaven’s work on earth.
You’re never sure what they’ll
■ deliver but the MLB playoff season should offer something delicious for baseball fans. There are three 100-plus win teams in Cleveland, Houston and Los Angeles.
There are four more teams which had at least 91 wins in Boston, the Yankees, Washington and Arizona.
Cleveland shapes up as the team to beat. Top to bottom, they have the deepest, most balanced lineup in the post-season. The only problem there is those traits are invaluable in the gruelling regular season. In the playoffs, it’s usually about how your stars perform, specifically your two best starting pitchers and your two or three best positional players.
There are questions about Max Scherzer’s health in Washington but he and Stephen Strasburg have the ability to win series by themselves. I’d take a flyer on the Nats, or maybe that’s the Expos’ fan in me talking.
And finally, just when you want ■ to cut him a break; just when you want to move on from his various work stoppages and the Olympics, he sinks to an unprecedented new low.
Then you’re reminded of who hockey fans are dealing with.
Last week, Gary Bettman inserted himself into Calgary’s civic election, using Eric Francis’s column to paint Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi as the obstacle standing between the Flames and a new rink and suggested Nenshi will ultimately drive the Flames out of Calgary.
But there is this mayoral election coming up on Oct. 16 so ...
“I don’t weigh into politics,” Bettman actually said.
Of course you don’t, Gary, just as I’m sure you didn’t weigh into politics in Phoenix.
There are two issues in play in Calgary but let’s set aside the tiresome debate over public money going into facilities for a private business and focus on Bettman.
What the NHL commissioner did was so odious, it turns the stomach. His passive-aggressive characterization of Nenshi as the problem in Calgary is an insult to the Calgarian’s intelligence. But his threat to move the Flames is equally abhorrent.
I actually thought the NHL was beyond the old, look-what-happened-in-Winnipeg-and-Quebec scare tactic which was so popular in the mid- to late-’90s but Bettman apparently thinks it’s still a winning gambit.
The fact is the Flames are a profitable enterprise in Calgary. Maybe they’re not the moneymaking machine they’ve been at other times.
But they’re a middling-NHL franchise and the thought of the NHL abandoning this market while they’re in Phoenix, Florida, Carolina, etc., etc., is laughable.
Do the Flames need a new rink? One supposes. But that’s for the city and the team to sort out.
For the commissioner of a professional sports league to try to influence the very serious affairs of a city’s public life is inexcusable.