for the first part i guess the context is the history of the franchise and the longue durée of canucks fandom, though obviously i didn’t experience the first almost 20 years. if the same thing happened today with, say, pettersson and miller next year choking away the hart/ross and division, i probably wouldn’t react close to as strongly.
for the first 20 years, the canucks sucked. not only was there no success other than a cinderella run to the finals the year after i was born, but there were precisely zero star players. no 50 goal seasons, no one really came close to 100 pts.
so i ambiently absorbed the culture of irrelevance and suckitude when i was young, and started paying attention once that was about to turn at the very end of the 80s. the oilers still had messier, who was on the cusp of leveling up, and for a brief time kurri and fuhr were still there. the flames were a powerhouse and won the cup. even winnipeg had hawerchuk. everybody gets a superstar and we got two broken down former all-stars, barry pederson and paul reinhart, and a big promising young rookie who was the runner up for the calder. but you have to realize, for a team that had won nothing and had no one notable ever, linden finishing second behind leetch for the calder was a gigantic deal. this wasn't like montreal having michael ryder come in as a rookie and finishing as raycroft’s runner up; in magnitude, it was like young patrik laine on the (new) jets pushing auston matthews right out of the draft. relative to what linden actually was, which was a very very good well-rounded player with a sub-elite offensive ceiling, the hype and excitement was completely over the top.
then we got larionov and krutov, a hall of famer and a guy who probably would have made the hall of fame if he’d just retired instead of coming to vancouver, and they flopped. meanwhile makarov put up a pt/game season and won the calder. the “we can’t have nice things” vibe was very real and actively felt.
when we got geoff courtnall, that felt like the ceiling of what a canuck could be. B+ goal scorer with a little bit of name rec due maybe more to his flashy brother than himself.
bure changed everything of course. when he came in, the entire city held its breath and thought, is this real life? because it really didn’t feel like it could be real. when he slumped after a couple of weeks and had his 3 goals/8 pts in 22 game stretch, it felt like it was happening all over again, lucy pulling the ball away. and then when he picked it back up and murdered the league down the stretch, and then the voters actually chose him for the calder over amonte, who outscored him and played for freakin’ new york, and lidstrom, who tied him in scoring and let’s be honest was probably the actual “best” rookie, that was bananas. the canucks also leveled up to become an actual good team that year (top five in the league), won their division for the first time ever, and kirk mclean was the vezina runner up and a legit and well-deserved 4th in hart voting. this is literally when i became a canucks fan just from peer pressure, because previously why would you? as kids, we all just had different teams before that. mine was the habs.
and then a year later, bure hits 60, scores 110 pts. he didn’t just hit the previously unthinkable statistical thresholds, he cleared them by 10. year after that, he leads the league in goals — again, the idea of a canuck leading the league in anything was unfathomable — and first team all-star and of course the finals run.
so that’s the context for naslund and the 2003 canucks in that game against LA.
the next plateau was the hart/ross. like, do we actually have the best player in the league? we did not. but that was demonstrated in a ridiculously gut-punching way, getting shutout by a non-playoff kings team and naslund’s childhood rival taking his shiny trophies. and the division part was also important. the avs had owned the division, literally won every division title, since they joined it. if we could have won the division with forsberg and sakic and blake all still there, this very unlikely naslund/bertuzzi core that unexpectedly came together might, you know, actually be a legit cup contender the way the late 90s/early 2000s superteams (detroit/colorado/dallas/nj) were. but we were made to see thoroughly and unmercilessly that no this was not actually a contending team, just a one line team with a garbage goalie and mental fragility issues.
and this is also the context for that game at the end of the 2010 season when the sedins went hog wild on the flames and won henrik the hart/ross. after what happened to naslund, them coming through like that and taking those awards out of the hands of peak ovechkin/crosby was like winning a cup. it seems silly to say but it was.
as i said in a thread on the canucks board recently, you really come to appreciate quinn hughes as a once in a lifetime player if you’ve been following the team long enough to remember tom kurvers as your first PP QB. our team went almost 50 years without a true star defenceman tilting the ice.