The Sports Corner

It’s still a long season ahead for Canucks, relax

It’s not even the end of October and already hospitals across the Lower Mainland have seen an increase in emergency room visits for people with ankle injuries.

This seems to happen every year around this time in the B.C. South Coast when the Vancouver Canucks hit the ice. Lofty expectations thrust upon fans by the dozens of local and national media pundits, who believed after the summer Canucks general manager Mike Gillis had, said this team could really push for a Stanley Cup.

That’s flattering if you consider the Canucks are pushing the Toronto Maple Leafs for one of the more frustrating and humiliating streaks in professional sports.

The team has sputtered out of the gate, barely reminiscent of a team destined for eighth spot in the Western Conference, let alone a birth in the second, third or final round of the NHL playoffs.

The Canucks sit at 3-5-0. They had a chance to climb back to the .500 mark two nights ago in Edmonton, but showed glimpses of that lovable team two years ago that did everything but score, which is something you need to do consistently every game in order to win.

They barely slid by the Minnesota Wild, who are another team pushing Canada’s most beloved hockey team from Toronto for pure mediocrity.

They have looked bad in two games against the Calgary Flames, their bitter division rival that went out and landed potentially the biggest free agent signing of the summer in Jay Bouwmeester.

Heck, even the Colorado Avalanche and their team of youngsters and a goalie no one has ever given the time of the day managed to beat the Canucks. And quite handedly, too.

But for all that has gone bad in Canuck Nation, including injuries to Daniel Sedin, Sami Salo, Pavol Demitra and Matthieu Schneider, people need to remember it’s still October.

Last time anyone checked, a team was never declared mathematically eliminated from playoff contention by Halloween.

In fact, if we recall last year, the Canucks had dropped to 13 points back of the Flames by the start of February after a dreadful month of January that found the team in a brutal eight-game losing skid and nine-game streak of monumental L’s on home ice.

By the middle of April, the Canucks had regained top spot in the Northwest Division and made it to Game Six of the Western Conference semifinals – a series that could have easily ended in six games with a different team coming out on top had Vancouver held onto that precarious 1-0 lead in the fourth game of that series.

Imagine that, though. With two months left in a season that was literally hanging by the teeth, the Canucks managed to crawl up from the depths, coincidentally where they find themselves now.

And yet, how soon some forget?

For all those out there, the 2009-10 season of predicted greatness is not lost. Not yet, and actually, still far from it.

But the Canucks do have to realize that they can’t afford to fall behind the eight ball too much in the early going. While coming back is conceivable, it’s certainly not a position they’d like to find themselves in all over again.

And a win in Chicago tonight, where last year’s Mar. 29 brawl and Game Four and Six debacles occurred, would go a long way in making sure an exact repeat of last year’s comeback doesn’t happen this season.