Re: Cloutier, one interesting takeaway from Scott Rintoul's West Coast Express podcast series is that Brian Burke disputes the idea that Cloutier's play took a nosedive "in the playoffs" as such, but rather that he had too much trouble staying healthy, so that his play would decline toward the end of the season.
It amounts to more or less the same thing (he needed to be upgraded), but I do wonder how much of it was health related.
i always thought that too. he was good for at least one second half injury a year.
in 2002, he hurt his ankle in january and missed five weeks. it was left to the great peter skudra to o 6-2-1, 1.90 GAA, .927 SV% — over that stretch, 3rd in wins, and top ten in both GAA and SV%. iirc, that skudra stretch got the canucks on the roll going into the olympic break that pulled them into the number eight seed (up to cloutier getting hurt, they were 21-25-4, when he came back they were 28-27-5).
in 2003, it was the opposite. the canucks were killing it: 38-16-9 record and a single point out of first place when cloutier sprained his knee. and cloutier was playing maybe the best hockey of his life too—he got hurt coming off a shutout and was 7-0-1, 1.69, .940 in the three weeks leading up to the injury. but this time skudra crapped the bed, going 2-2-3, 3.51, .880 (alex auld was called up and looked good, going 1-2 but with excellent numbers: 1.48 and .941). all in all, the canucks were still in third place when clouts came back, and their lead over colorado for the division had only shrunk a little, but the slide didn't stop once cloutier came back and we all know what happened on the last day of the 2003 season.
but 2003 is where i get what burke is saying about health. when cloutier came back, he wasn't the same. he went 2-3-1, 2.65, .899 (auld continued his stellar play and most of us wanted him to start in the playoffs: 2-1, 1.68, .938; skudra was never heard from again). definitely could have been the case of a brittle goalie breaking down. when you don't trust your body, how can you play goal in the playoffs?
in 2004, cloutier got hurt multiple times. he hurt his groin in december 2003, then his hip in march, and then famously sprained his ankle in game three of the playoffs. and he was never healthy in his career after that.
I swear, if we didn't have the most SOFTY PRONE GOALIE in history, we would have won the cup. I hated Cloutier to the point of madness.
i know a lot of people here have a lot of love for the WCE team and i am here for that. i've been very negative in the past about a lot of those guys: naslund, bertuzzi, crawford, cloutier of course, but i know what that group meant to people and i want to respect that.
naslund was legitimately a fantastic player when he was on. on pure talent, i think it's a tossup between him, bure, and pettersson as the second most talented forward we've ever had, after mogilny. bertuzzi when he was on was flat out unstoppable. only bertuzzi could stop bertuzzi.
but i just can't see that team winning a cup, even if you swapped in khabibulin or kiprusoff or some other elite goalie for clouts. for one, they had extremely flawed coaching. they were playing run and gun hockey in the era that was probably the hardest ever to win playing that style. but ultimately, whatever we want to say about the ability of the top guys to take over a playoff game or a series when it mattered, that was a one line team. after the WCE, you had the baby sedins, there was cooke, old linden, trent klatt, chubie was great for what he was but... that's not a real cup threat. this is an era when colorado was running sakic and forsberg, detroit had yzerman, fedorov, draper, and young datsyuk down the middle, with a hall of fame winger on each line. the teams they would have had to beat in 2003 had peak unstoppable giguere, then peak brodeur behind a D of peak niedermayer, scott stevens, rafalski, and colin white. i just don't see how that one line team could have won.
that said, playoff clouts was very very very bad. zero argument there.
