Goalie Vancouver’s newest underdog legend

Fans of the Vancouver Canucks have long loved their underdogs.

Perhaps it’s because cheering on the team itself has almost always felt like an underdog experience. How else to explain persevering through five decades of championship-free, never-quite-there misery?

You must find the little things to enjoy.

Like third-string goaltenders posting shutouts in series-clinching games on the road.

Even with the game thousands of kilometres away, Canucks fans who were walking out of Rogers Arena following the Game 6 viewing party were chanting “Silovs! Silovs!” in the streets for goalie Arturs Silovs .

With a glove like that, you know you should be glad.

Canucks fans have always taken a liking to backup goalies — think Eddie Lack, Cory Schneider and Bob Essensa — as well as the true underdogs, like Jeff Cowan, Rory Fitzpatrick. Whatever else happens in his career, Silovs is now in this pile of fan fun.

With Silovs now certain to start Game 1 Tuesday versus the Edmonton Oilers , they’ll have a little bit of time to practise taking those chants to the next level: follow the lead of Latvian fans last year, I say.

After Silovs played a starring role for his homeland at the World Championships at home in Riga, leading them to a third-place finish, Latvia’s best-ever placing at the Worlds, fans took inspiration from the Beatles’s classic hit She Loves You.

Silovs in Latvian is correctly pronounced almost exactly as “she loves” in English, so Latvian fans simply sang “Silovs you, yeah, yeah yeah.”

What an opening that would be to the series, having fans serenading their newest underdog hero.

And in the series to come, the Canucks are going to need Silovs at his absolute best.

Thatcher Demko is back on the ice, but his return isn’t imminent. All the timelines being whispered behind the scenes about a possible return for Demko have it will likely be late in the series, not early.

So Silovs will be the man for a little while yet.

“I just wanted to embrace the challenge and I’ve played on big stages before and was already familiar with what could happen,” Silovs said after Friday’s win.

He’s as calm as it gets, even in victory.

But you know he quietly relishes it all.

“Every game for a goalie is outperforming the other guy and winning the battle,” he added.

The Canucks defeated the Predators because they were strong on defence, especially on the penalty kill. They killed off 19 of 21 Nashville power plays, a remarkable statistic.

One of the two goals, remember, was Silovs knocking the puck into his own net after a mad goalmouth smash up. So really, only one shot beat him clean.

But in the series to come, the PK is going to be under as much pressure as you can get.

The Oilers have the NHL’S best power play.

They demolished the Los Angeles Kings in the first round in large part due to their power play.