Monday, April 7, 2003 - Page updated at 12:00 AM
Steve Kelley / Times staff columnist
On the verge of triumph, Canucks choke
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Across the street, the early April regular-season finale was sold out, and the noise inside GM Place suggested something special was about to happen.
They came here yesterday to celebrate. The Vancouver Canucks were going to win their first division championship in a decade. Their left winger, Markus Naslund, was going to win the goal-scoring and scoring titles, and, eventually, the most valuable player trophy.
This game against the going-nowhere Los Angeles Kings was going to be the jumpstart for a wondrous Stanley Cup run.
But with so much to win, the Canucks lost. The game. The division championship. And all of that hardware for Markus Naslund.
They played scared. They made mistakes that real Stanley Cup threats don't make. They didn't look much like the team that had earned a franchise-high 104 points.
They looked more like some other recent Vancouver Canucks. Like the Canucks of 1999 or 2000, or some of those other bleak years since they last went to the Stanley Cup Finals in 1994.
They were in first place for the past four months. They were in first place going into the 82nd game of the season, but with so much riding on one game, the Canucks, well they, um ...
"We choked," Naslund said after the 2-0 loss to the Kings. "We had this game in our hands to take care of it. Just get a point. One point and we would have won our division. I don't want to call it a choke, but if you don't take advantage of two chances in a row to finish it off, then I don't know if you deserve to win it."
Vancouver had a 3-1 lead at Phoenix on Wednesday, but the game ended in a 3-3 tie.
The Canucks had their chances against Kings goaltender Jamie Storr yesterday, but they missed open nets and fanned on golden chances.
Two opportunities against bad teams, and the Canucks couldn't win. And, while they were losing to the Kings, Colorado was winning the Northwest Division by beating St. Louis.
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"Choke is a little too strong a word," said Naslund, who finished the regular season with 48 goals and 56 assists, second in scoring to his good friend, Colorado's Peter Forsberg. "But on the other hand, we got to face it that we didn't play well the last two games. The two biggest games of the year, and that's something we got to change. We can't fool ourselves and pretend that we did play well. Because we didn't."
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