with luongo, i wanna take a show of hands of everyone here who has kids. does everyone understand how you go from 2007 luongo to 2009 and later luongo? ie, going from embarking on one of the greatest peaks of all time to still excellent but more like a solid top 5 in the league peak? my kid was born four years after 2011 and almost immediately i was like, yeah i get how he lost his edge now.
re: jersey retirements, i think of it like this:
the sedins, the only true no brainers. they had the career numbers, henrik was a longtime captain, the awards, the team success.
then going in chronological order,
smyl. when he retired, he was the team’s all time leader in games, goals, assists, and points and the team had been around for twenty years. he’d been the captain for the better part of a decade. he was the co-leading scorer of their cinderella finals run. he embodied hard work, grit, determination, and was a very important member of the community. sure it looks bad now, but at the time it was absolutely justifiable.
linden, i can’t say it any better than this:
I mean, excellence is a huge part of it. But there are exceptions for guys who find other ways to leave a huge legacy and have a massive connection with the city and fans.
1. Again, Linden’s off-ice/charity contributions were on a different level from anyone else in the history of the franchise and set a standard and culture, and that’s a huge legacy.
2. This team was drawing 9000 fans in the mid-80s and were behind the BC Lions in popularity, and three people were mostly behind the titanic chance in franchise profile in this market by 1994 : Pat Quinn, Trevor Linden, and Pavel Bure. And again, that legacy is enormous.
Linden is also the best playoff performer in franchise history by a fair margin.
bure, it wouldn’t be for pavel bure the person or citizen, but for the absolute rush and thrill of what at the time was an unprecedented two and a bit years, from the spring of 1992 to the end of the 94 playoffs. like when bure at the end of his rookie year started to score a goal every game and we actually finally had a real honest to god superstar, you had to be there to understand what that meant to this fanbase and city. and then he actually wins a trophy, then he comes back and actually scores 50 goals, hits 100 pts, finishes the year with 60, then repeats those numbers the year after, then takes us to the finals. the is-this-real-life aspect is hard to overstate. our highest goal scorer had been tony tanti, our highest pts total in a single season was patrik sundstrom.
so for those three jersey retirements, smyl, linden, bure, not no brainers, but they do tell us what jersey retirements are for. if you didn’t live it, this is important canucks history for those who care to learn it.
which brings us to naslund. every other inductee represents taking the franchise to a new level, on top of raising the bar individually.
* smyl and the ’82 run, linden was the most successful prospect coming in that we ever had, runner up for the calder, the captained the team from second last to winning the smythe two years in a row.
* and don’t forget, in the fall of 1991, when the canucks first established themselves as an elite team, that team was 10-4-1
before bure’s first game, third in the league, first in the campbell’s conference. the day before bure’s first game, linden was 6th in scoring, in a massive six-way tie with mario, messier, oates, roenick, and macinnis. fwiw, ronning was one pt ahead, tied for 3rd. but at the halfway mark, dec 31, linden was 9th in scoring, tied with oates. the nearest canuck was ronning, six pts behind, in 18th. the canucks were tied with detroit for 4th in the league and first in the campbell’s conference, with a game in hand. all to say, even though mclean was playing out of his mind vezina hockey, linden was very much in the hart trophy discussion through the first half of that season and his “emergence” at the time (which in retrospect turned out to be a hot streak) was synonymous with the team’s.
* and then of course linden's playoff heroics also raised the bar. he left vancouver the first time a game seven stat line of 5 games, 4 goals, 4 assists, 8 pts, +5. 80 playoff pts in 79 games up to his last playoffs pre-messier signing, 16th in the league from ’89 to ’96.
* bure, i don’t have to get into.
so this is where i think naslund is the only true mistake. did he raise the bar for individual accomplishments? actually yes. bure had finished 3rd in pts, but in a pitiful way during the 1998 season. nobody had really contended for the art ross or hart like naslund had before, but of course he came up small in the last game of the season to lose the hart/ross and also the rocket. then he came up small in the playoffs.
but even that aside, to me, the reason naslund was a mistake is that while he didn’t raise the team to any new heights, the real substance of why it was a mistake is we had already seen by the time his jersey was retired newer heights individually. before naslund even left vancouver, we’d seen luongo finish a much more convincing second for the hart (naslund got almost no first place votes), and by the time his jersey went up in the winter of 2010, we’d already seen henrik’s heroic final game performance to take the hart/ross. unless you want to make the argument that you had to be there in the early 2000s to really feel the significance of the WCE — which i just really disagree with — or if if you think every era needs to be memorialized, then i just don’t see a reason for naslund. december 11, 2010, naslund’s jersey goes up: he’s the all time leading scorer, but henrik is only 151 pts behind. we all knew his “accomplishments” were already basically obsolete.
and so, luongo. i really don’t see a reason to induct him based on all this. yes, the 2007 season was absolutely unprecedented, in the way that now having hughes is completely unprecedented. but that was one year, and the rest of his tenure was basically markus naslund with more team success. he was better than naslund, both peak and overall, but not enough to move the needle imo.
