Did Mike Keenan Destory what Could've been a superteam? Or was the situation doomed no matter what?

[vadim sharifijanov]

Keenan's trading of Linden and applying his application of the Keenan method to Bertuzzi were significant to this franchise's fortunes.

beating st louis after their best player’s career ended and the entire team got sick counts as a fortune now?

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

the Linden deal. Had he taken the "we want to be competitive now" or "he's a Career Canuck" approach with the team or with Linden we wouldn't have had the Sedins or Luongo. No WCE either.

Linden for McCabe, Bertuzzi, and a 3 being a huge one that Benning didn't have the guts to ever do.

huh? that was a player that 100% needed to be moved. how can you give keenan props for having the “courage” to move him?

now if you want to give keenan props for getting good value back, whereas in the same situation benning got back anaheim’s oldest “young” forward, seventh best young defenseman, and lower first round pick, go nuts.

Burke turned Mogilny and Bure into Jovo and Morrison

i get there were extenuating circumstances and i loved jobo and morrison but read that sentence again and ask yourself if it’s a positive.

bure had two scoring titles left in him, including a year where he finished second in points and third in mvp voting. mogilny had two point/game years left (in the DPE), including a year he was sixth in goals.

If we'd stuck with Burke and Sanderson, the Gelinas deal would have been a huge win. Like, a landslide. Burke was a top-5 goalie in the NHL during the WCE era and having him on the team instead of Cloutier probably means a Cup or close to it.

no way we get phoenix burke in vancouver. benoit allaire completely rebuilt his game and put burke’s tools as a big huge guy who could read the play well to good use for the first time in his career. meanwhile, in vancouver, garth snow was a big guy with good reflexes and zero technique. cloutier was a guy who could let a proverbial beach ball from center ice pass through him.

as for the WCE, a goalie wouldn’t make naslund and bertuzzi score goals in the playoffs. zero chance that team wins a cup against three shutouts in the finals brodeur, scott stevens, niedermayer at the peak of his powers, selke john madden, pandolfo, etc etc.

Keenan had no respect for Linden, after a 4-1 loss to the Blues, Linden was trying to motivate the players and give speeches in the locker room. Keenan had some harsh words to say and said something like "who are you, you never won anything"

which is ironic because trevor linden won two memorial cups and a WJC gold before he turned 18, then led the second worst team in the league to the playoffs and game seven OT against the eventual cup champs in year one, 100 pts and the top of the division by year four, and game seven of the SCF in year six. keenan might have been a nathan lafayette goal post or a cliff ronning wrist shot away from linden saying the same to him.

 

[Mr. Canucklehead]

iirc all three of them were shuffled btw their natural positions of D to LW/RW, stunting the development of staios and probably also cullimore. neither guy was a bona fide NHL calibre regular until long after they were gone. come to think of it, aucoin was aPP specialist and fourth line winger for a bit too right?

worked out for walker but again, not soon enough to be helpful to us.

i totally agree—those big pat quinn teams were why we were successful in the early 90s, and he got away from that. i still think the biggest lost opportunity in canucks history is quinn not letting momesso jump the boards after the messier/linden cheap shot to wreak havoc. we had the muscle to come back in game seven too—stack the top nine and roll hunter/antoski/gino as the fourth line for one or two shifts early to make brian leetch think.

i think even looking at the guys who didn’t work out longterm —tom fergus, ryan walter, dr gregg, dirk, sandlak, that’s a lot of beef to stand up to marty mcsorley or gary roberts or keith tkachuk. it still seems nuts that those guys are the young guys we gave up (cullimore, aucoin, scratch, walker). quinn was still drafting those guys; they just never got a fair shot. well tbf i think cullimore just sucked and actually oksiuta was fine as a sandpaper placement or even poor man’s momesso.

i remember these billboards from the beginning of the burke era, when there was precisely nothing to be excited about during training camp. “stevie and mo,” i.e. kariya’s even tinier brother and morrison. was like, are you fffffing kidding me?

Walker was claimed by Nashville in the expansion draft, if I'm not mistaken - definitely a tough pill to swallow as he blossomed with more responsibility than being the bat out of hell shit disturber he was cast as in Vancouver (God, I loved the Wild Thing).

Cullimore at least netted us Brashear, who was useful for a time.

But yeah - it is somewhat interesting how many useful players who had successful careers couldn't seem to get a break in Vancouver.

 

[F A N]

beating st louis after their best player’s career ended and the entire team got sick counts as a fortune now?

? What are you talking about? I was talking about the Linden trade and Keenan helping Bertuzzi reach his potential.

 

[MS]

Walker was claimed by Nashville in the expansion draft, if I'm not mistaken - definitely a tough pill to swallow as he blossomed with more responsibility than being the bat out of hell **** disturber he was cast as in Vancouver (God, I loved the Wild Thing).

Cullimore at least netted us Brashear, who was useful for a time.

But yeah - it is somewhat interesting how many useful players who had successful careers couldn't seem to get a break in Vancouver.

It's the same thing we saw with the Vegas expansion and what I've been pulling my hair out with for for years with a guy like Biega.

Guys get typecast and teams can't think outside the box or recognize/process new information.

On that team, you had Brian Noonan who was an old 'good 3rd liner' who couldn't skate and bled goals and was out of the league the next year but was gifted middle-6 minutes no matter what because of what he did 5 years before. Conversely, you had Walker who was young and fast with a huge motor and put up big numbers at lower levels ... but he was typecast as '4th line pest' and never given any opportunity to prove otherwise. And then gets claimed by Nashville where they have to give guys chances and immediately scores 40 points including more ES points than every single member of that year's Canucks team. Oops.

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

speaking of which, aucoin. that's the guy we let go in the burke era that i always thought was the worst idea. for how many years did we say, if only our PP had a legit point shot threat?

if our PP had been

naslund morrison bertuzzi
jovo aucoin

instead of some combination of ohlund, salo, and sopel there, would we even be talking about naslund losing that art ross on the last game of the season? or would we be talking about why isn't two-time art ross winner markus naslund not in the hall of fame?

ditto mccabe, but i'm glad we traded him away obviously.

 

[RandV]

Wasnt Quinn the one to blame with his handling of Bure and his weird phonecall that ****ed up the Gretsky signing ?

Basically that's the Vancouver story that's well known here and been around for a long time. Makes a good 10 second soundbyte so it gets repeated a lot. It's when you take a much deeper look at the topic that you come to the conclusion that Gretzky probably never intended to play here but was just using us as negotiating leverage.

 

[Ratsreign]

Canucks fans should at least thank the POS Keenan for trading Lu to Vancouver. He must've wanted to try and make it all up to you guys.

 

[Hit the post]

It's the same thing we saw with the Vegas expansion and what I've been pulling my hair out with for for years with a guy like Biega.

Guys get typecast and teams can't think outside the box or recognize/process new information.

On that team, you had Brian Noonan who was an old 'good 3rd liner' who couldn't skate and bled goals and was out of the league the next year but was gifted middle-6 minutes no matter what because of what he did 5 years before. Conversely, you had Walker who was young and fast with a huge motor and put up big numbers at lower levels ... but he was typecast as '4th line pest' and never given any opportunity to prove otherwise. And then gets claimed by Nashville where they have to give guys chances and immediately scores 40 points including more ES points than every single member of that year's Canucks team. Oops.

Re: Noonan...more like Keenan had the odd obsession with Noonan. Seemed like wherever Keenan went, Noonan was sure to follow. Good thing for us he had that same obsession with Bertuzzi post-Moore incident.

 

[MS]

Re: Noonan...more like Keenan had the odd obsession with Noonan. Seemed like wherever Keenan went, Noonan was sure to follow. Good thing for us he had that same obsession with Bertuzzi post-Moore incident.

In our case, Noonan was here first and it was happy fortune for Keenan. But Renney was also overplaying him before that.

 

[iceburg]

Basically that's the Vancouver story that's well known here and been around for a long time. Makes a good 10 second soundbyte so it gets repeated a lot. It's when you take a much deeper look at the topic that you come to the conclusion that Gretzky probably never intended to play here but was just using us as negotiating leverage.

And Quinn knew it.

 

[MS]

And Quinn knew it.

Yup.

It’s a long time ago now but there was a ton of discussion about this on Dan Russell’s show at the time and IIRC the actual chain of events was something like this :

1) Vancouver and Gretzky/Barnett were negotiating late into the night and Vancouver made an offer. Gretzky tells them he wants to sleep on it.

2) the Canucks get tipped off that unbeknownst to them, Gretzky had also been negotiating with NYR and had a meeting booked for the next morning. Vancouver realizes they’re getting played and their offer is just going to be used for leverage and he really had no intention of signing here (or at best, are the backup plan).

3) George McPhee, who is a bit of a hothead, phones the Gretzky camp and confronts them with the NYR news and challenges them to sign the contract or complete the negotiation right then and there if they’re actually serious. Or get stuffed if they’re just using the Canucks.

4) Gretzky predictably refuses and then has a tailor-made excuse for why he didn’t sign with a team he was never going to sign for anyway. And we end up being the ones looking bad when they were negotiating in bad faith.

Again, there was just no way ever that Gretzky was going to choose to come to a small Canadian team over taking his actress wife to Broadway and reuniting with Messier. In hindsight it’s almost comical to think he actually wanted to come here.

 

[Hit the post]

Dan Russell.

Man I miss listening to a radio guy that knew really his stuff (I overlooked his Boston bias because he was THAT good). Then he got all bitter.

 

[MS]

Dan Russell.

Man I miss listening to a radio guy that knew really his stuff (I overlooked his Boston bias because he was THAT good). Then he got all bitter.

Was the best radio talk guy this market has ever had by a country mile until he lost the plot and became a bitter old man when Shorthouse got the PBP job he so badly wanted. What a waste.

 

[Melvin]

Was the best radio talk guy this market has ever had by a country mile until he lost the plot and became a bitter old man when Shorthouse got the PBP job he so badly wanted. What a waste.

I mean. Even after that he was still probably the best though?

 

[MS]

I mean. Even after that he was still probably the best though?

Sadly yes.

Best thing about his show wasn’t even hockey related - it was the weekly baseball segment with Rod Beaton. Probably one of the things that made me a baseball fan.

 

[Melvin]

Dan's show was my first exposure to Ray Ferraro, who had pretty much just retired when he started coming on Sports Talk weekly in 2002-2003. I am pretty ambivalent about Ferraro these days, but at the time he was basically the first hockey "expert" or "analyst" I had ever heard who seemed to have a modicum of intelligence and actually seemed to think about things instead of just spouting cliches. It was such an amazing breath of fresh air at the time.

 

[seekritdude]

Keenan waited too long to let Irbe have more games. McLean was struggling so badly and Keenan kept playing him

well actually it was more so Keenan just straight up said he didnt want to play irbe despite the team actually having a winning record with them. Im sure if someone is bored enough they can find the quote wasnt it something along the lines of like hes to small to be a good goalie or something? Oh well ...

 

[lawrence]

well actually it was more so Keenan just straight up said he didnt want to play irbe despite the team actually having a winning record with them. Im sure if someone is bored enough they can find the quote wasnt it something along the lines of like hes to small to be a good goalie or something? Oh well ...

Mind boggling. I think he was just the “backup” so starter starts regardless. Kinda like when cloutier was the starter despite his backups being better goalies then him (auld, Hedberg) starter is the starter. The irony is that right after we let Irbe go he was give another chance to be a starter, and he was a starter caliber player and even made the finals In 2002.

 

[Hit the post]

well actually it was more so Keenan just straight up said he didnt want to play irbe despite the team actually having a winning record with them. Im sure if someone is bored enough they can find the quote wasnt it something along the lines of like hes to small to be a good goalie or something? Oh well ...

I recall Brian Burke kind of insulting Irbe by calling him a plan B goalie. Keenan wasn't the only guy that didn't like Irbe.

 

[RandV]

Mind boggling. I think he was just the “backup” so starter starts regardless. Kinda like when cloutier was the starter despite his backups being better goalies then him (auld, Hedberg) starter is the starter. The irony is that right after we let Irbe go he was give another chance to be a starter, and he was a starter caliber player and even made the finals In 2002.

You're misremembering things and doing a disservice to Dan Cloutier. The 1 season Hedberg played here his numbers were well below Cloutier's. Auld had some impressive sv%'s but he was like 22 and the 3rd string goalie so was getting about 5 sheltered games a season as an injury replacement.

The only backup better than Cloutier who wasn't played was Bob Essensa. And that was actually Felix Potvin they were playing over him, who got traded late in the season for Cloutier. And the reason they kept deferring away from Essensa is because as lovable as he was for us he was a 35 year old backup who's career was almost done. The next season he played for Buffalo he played 9 games with an 0.850 sv% and then hanged up the skates. And it's not like he was even particularly good for us, his sv% was 0.892, rather the team just somehow kept winning with him in net and the long suffering fans wanted more:

Essensa: 2.68 0.892 39-18-12-3 vs
Potvin: 3.08 0.887 35-14-17-3 vs
Cloutier: 2.43 0.894 16-4-6-5

And back to the point I was getting to the reason they kept turning back to Potvin and then Cloutier is because Potvin was on his way out and had no future with the team, for that Crawford/Burke really needed Potvin/Cloutier to be the guy. Basically the exact opposite approach of the Canucks under Desjardins with Ryan Miller over Lack/Markstrom at every opportunity.

 

[lawrence]

You're misremembering things and doing a disservice to Dan Cloutier. The 1 season Hedberg played here his numbers were well below Cloutier's. Auld had some impressive sv%'s but he was like 22 and the 3rd string goalie so was getting about 5 sheltered games a season as an injury replacement.

The only backup better than Cloutier who wasn't played was Bob Essensa. And that was actually Felix Potvin they were playing over him, who got traded late in the season for Cloutier. And the reason they kept deferring away from Essensa is because as lovable as he was for us he was a 35 year old backup who's career was almost done. The next season he played for Buffalo he played 9 games with an 0.850 sv% and then hanged up the skates. And it's not like he was even particularly good for us, his sv% was 0.892, rather the team just somehow kept winning with him in net and the long suffering fans wanted more:

Essensa: 2.68 0.892 39-18-12-3 vs
Potvin: 3.08 0.887 35-14-17-3 vs
Cloutier: 2.43 0.894 16-4-6-5

And back to the point I was getting to the reason they kept turning back to Potvin and then Cloutier is because Potvin was on his way out and had no future with the team, for that Crawford/Burke really needed Potvin/Cloutier to be the guy. Basically the exact opposite approach of the Canucks under Desjardins with Ryan Miller over Lack/Markstrom at every opportunity.

Was never a fan of cloutier from the beginning. He was riding on a hot Canucks team.

 

[VanJack]

There wasn't a chance in the world that 'Iron Mike" and his old Rangers captain Messier would ever replicate in Vancouver what they accomplished in New York. Canucks ownership was blinded by the results of the '94 Cup Final.

About the only good to come out of those years was Keenan flipping Trevor Linden to the Islanders for Bertuzzi and McCabe, who would eventually be a trade chip to acquire the second Sedin.

But that's about it.

 

[RandV]

Was never a fan of cloutier from the beginning. He was riding on a hot Canucks team.

Yes well I happen to be Cloutier's biggest defender on here and you're bias against him lead you to remembered and state things that were either flat out wrong or attributed to Potvin. These things really make me rage!!!

My opinion on Cloutier has always been the same. I switched from a bandwagon fan to an avid fan mid-season before we signed Messier, so I had no Kirk McLean nostalgia but rather had to live through a number of long years while the Canucks were plagued with a carousel of bad goaltending (Irbe aside). Cloutier wasn't great but he wasn't bad and he was the first guy to come in and stabilize the position, so I appreciate him for that. To me he was basically just a Jacob Markstrom.

I think there's a couple of factors that go into public opinion on him. First with the Canucks being good again brought a lot of new fans onto the bandwagon with expectations of success who didn't remember the bad goaltending years and this was the pre-cap era so all the top teams had elite goaltending: Hasek, Roy, Brodeur, Belfour, Joseph, and the like. The fans were demanding a Luongo but all they got was a Markstrom... and ironically note how when we moved into this category with Luongo public opinion had shifted to top tier goaltending didn't really matter and you don't want to spend to much cap on a goalie

Next he had the misfortune of a once in a career flub coming at the worst time right at the start of his career as a starter and making it all anyone could remember. Don't need to go into too much detail on that.

Finally, he really never had much opportunity to reverse opinion. He really only had a 4 year window and two of those playoffs were as the 8th seeds against dynasty teams Detroit and Colorado. He was getting better every year but in playoffs #4 against Calgary he was playing great then suffered a fluke injury stepping on a bad spot of ice and leaving the game for Auld who wasn't nearly as good and probably costing us the series. He was only 27 at this point and it was followed by the lockout year, should have been going into his goaltending prime but instead the injuries had piled up and he was no longer the same after that season. He'd stick around a couple more years but just couldn't play through the injuries.

This is pretty much the history thread so I'm going to have my Cloutier rant here

 

[Hit the post]

Yes well I happen to be Cloutier's biggest defender on here and you're bias against him lead you to remembered and state things that were either flat out wrong or attributed to Potvin. These things really make me rage!!!

My opinion on Cloutier has always been the same. I switched from a bandwagon fan to an avid fan mid-season before we signed Messier, so I had no Kirk McLean nostalgia but rather had to live through a number of long years while the Canucks were plagued with a carousel of bad goaltending (Irbe aside). Cloutier wasn't great but he wasn't bad and he was the first guy to come in and stabilize the position, so I appreciate him for that. To me he was basically just a Jacob Markstrom.

I think there's a couple of factors that go into public opinion on him. First with the Canucks being good again brought a lot of new fans onto the bandwagon with expectations of success who didn't remember the bad goaltending years and this was the pre-cap era so all the top teams had elite goaltending: Hasek, Roy, Brodeur, Belfour, Joseph, and the like. The fans were demanding a Luongo but all they got was a Markstrom... and ironically note how when we moved into this category with Luongo public opinion had shifted to top tier goaltending didn't really matter and you don't want to spend to much cap on a goalie

Next he had the misfortune of a once in a career flub coming at the worst time right at the start of his career as a starter and making it all anyone could remember. Don't need to go into too much detail on that.

Finally, he really never had much opportunity to reverse opinion. He really only had a 4 year window and two of those playoffs were as the 8th seeds against dynasty teams Detroit and Colorado. He was getting better every year but in playoffs #4 against Calgary he was playing great then suffered a fluke injury stepping on a bad spot of ice and leaving the game for Auld who wasn't nearly as good and probably costing us the series. He was only 27 at this point and it was followed by the lockout year, should have been going into his goaltending prime but instead the injuries had piled up and he was no longer the same after that season. He'd stick around a couple more years but just couldn't play through the injuries.

This is pretty much the history thread so I'm going to have my Cloutier rant here

Cloutier was always more of a placeholder or sorts. More than decent during the regular season but not the kind of starter you want in the postseason unless you have a strong Blue line.

He was like Count Dooku. Luongo was the chosen one but didn't realize Thomas had the high ground.

Keenan is obviously Darth Sideous.