The Biggest Disappointments... Teams "DEAD TO ME"

[Gorskyontario]

the idea of a canuck leading the league in anything was unfathomable

I have always hated everything about the Canucks and the city of Vancouver(Except for Trevor linden and Doug Flutie), but this is unironically the saddest thing I have ever read. Maybe the Canada curse will be broken one day.

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

I have always hated everything about the Canucks and the city of Vancouver(Except for Trevor linden and Doug Flutie), but this is unironically the saddest thing I have ever read. Maybe the Canada curse will be broken one day.

there’s a happy ending though

we ended up getting a true mvp/top goalie in luongo

then the sedins unexpectedly broke through as hart/ross level guys

we had a selke winning 2C paired on the pk with the best defensive winger of his generation

and now we have a norris d, two centers in the top ten in scoring, and a vezina level goalie. holes to fill on our team, yes, and there was a very dark almost decade that only recently ended but lacking true top guys has not been the issue for fifteen years

 

[Nerowoy nora tolad]

Yes, but I'm deeply passionate about it and love it unconditionally.

And no one will believe this, but I was actually eating a vanilla yogurt while I typed this...

I wasnt making fun of Habs fandom, I was making fun of the 32-way tie.

Even if I was way too far away to follow either team, Ive always had a strong opinion for Isles>Rangers or Sharks>Kings.

My thesis is that hockey fandom is more shaped by the teams that make us feel intense hate than the ones we love.

 

[Michael Farkas]

Heh, I'm actually a Penguins fan. But I love Beliveau.

 

[Brodeur]

I was a SoCal kid that Gretzky helped convert into being a hockey fan. Hockey got on my radar by like 1991 and really escalated with the Kings playoff run in 1993.

If only for the excuse to expand on this, the other sports had 'dead to me' moments around the same time. I've had to explain countless times to people how hockey became my favorite sport and it really was a confluence of events:

1994 MLB Strike - Disavowed baseball for the 1995 season, took awhile for it to earn back my trust. Perhaps ironically the 1994 NHL lockout didn't bother me as much since at the time I didn't start paying attention to hockey until the second half anyways.

Rams/Raiders both leave Los Angeles at the end of the 1994 season - Disavowed football for the rest of the millennium. Unfortunately kinda had a repeat of that with the Chargers leaving town. I'll still watch, but I won't plan my whole Sunday around football like I used to.

~1993 - End of the Showtime Lakers. Magic Johnson had to retire a couple years earlier (but had a brief comeback later). James Worthy and Byron Scott would have their final years with the Lakers. LA was competitive but it was that awkward transition period before the Shaq/Kobe years started.

 

[Crosby2010]

I have always hated everything about the Canucks and the city of Vancouver(Except for Trevor linden and Doug Flutie), but this is unironically the saddest thing I have ever read. Maybe the Canada curse will be broken one day.

Doug Flutie.......................is there a QB in NFL history that got the shaft more than him and never truly got a fair shake? And even when he did they still got rid of him. It makes me dislike the city of Buffalo for that reason alone. He could have quarterbacked my team anyday

 

[sr edler]

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.

Yeah, we'll see what happens in these upcoming playoffs. I think it all depends on how many post-season gamers you really have on the roster. Petey with all his aloofness I think could actually be such a player, same with Demko, Miller perhaps as well, and it's a small man's league nowadays so someone like Hughes wouldn't necessarily be murdered either. Though you still have all that meltdown capacity in your arms, with guys like Myers and Zadorov, the twin towers. I don't follow any team that slavishly anymore, but IMO it would be great entertainment value with an all-Canadian finals, say Toronto vs Vancouver, that would be nuts, I don't think Toronto would make it that far though, more likely Vancouver IMO.

 

[Nerowoy nora tolad]

Yeah, we'll see what happens in these upcoming playoffs. I think it all depends on how many post-season gamers you really have on the roster. Petey with all his aloofness I think could actually be such a player, same with Demko, Miller perhaps as well, and it's a small man's league nowadays so someone like Hughes wouldn't necessarily be murdered either. Though you still have all that meltdown capacity in your arms, with guys like Myers and Zadorov, the twin towers. I don't follow any team that slavishly anymore, but IMO it would be great entertainment value with an all-Canadian finals, say Toronto vs Vancouver, that would be nuts, I don't think Toronto would make it that far though, more likely Vancouver IMO.

Leafs-Nucks would be a media circus even better than 2011. East coast bias, leafs bias, first canadian team to win a cup in forever, both teams have embarassing history over the last 50 years that will inevitably turn into a shit-flinging contest

Now that I think about it, wouldnt Toronto-Vancouver have to take the cake for the combination of fanbases that rarely play each other, have very little shared history, but they absolutely hate each other?

 

[Crosby2010]

Leafs-Nucks would be a media circus even better than 2011. East coast bias, leafs bias, first canadian team to win a cup in forever, both teams have embarassing history over the last 50 years that will inevitably turn into a shit-flinging contest

Now that I think about it, wouldnt Toronto-Vancouver have to take the cake for the combination of fanbases that rarely play each other, have very little shared history, but they absolutely hate each other?

Yeah, there's 1994 and.............................that's it. I think. Vancouver is just a stop on the Leafs' western road swing when they do it. Honestly, somewhere along the way one or both of those teams lose.

 

[The Panther]

Is Toronto-Vancouver in 1994 the most recent time that two Canadian clubs met in the third round? I honestly can't remember and am too lazy to look it up.

 

[Chet Donnelly]

Is Toronto-Vancouver in 1994 the most recent time that two Canadian clubs met in the third round? I honestly can't remember and am too lazy to look it up.

Canadian Team Stanley Cup Finalists' Opponents In Round 3 (Since 1995):

2004 Flames: San Jose Sharks
2006 Oilers: Mighty Ducks of Anaheim
2007 Senators: Buffalo Sabres
2011 Canucks: San Jose Sharks
2021 Canadiens: Vegas Golden Knights


Every Canadian Stanley Cup finalist since 1995 faced an American team in round 3, meaning that the Canucks/Leafs series in 1994 was the most recent all-Canadian conference final.

 

[MadLuke]

both teams have embarassing history over the last 50 years that will inevitably turn into a shit-flinging contest

Because of the no cup vs no cup in forever history, maybe not ? How much reserve of shit do they have to fling at each other ?

I am not sure in 2024 if any Canadian team fanbase has much to say to any other Canadian team fanbase, specially not to one that would just reached a Stanley Cup final... which is just has much of an achievement has any other team did since 1993...

well I say that and I am sure there people more creative than me that will find a way, the winds of shit can blow hard when the shit barometer number get too low.

 

[TheGreenTBer]

I've never really had a second team that I root for. Rangers fan, and nothing else, probably until the day I die.

That being said, a small part of me will never forgive the franchise for not winning the cup while Henrik was playing.

Yeah there are some teams I like and some I don't, but I don't see how a person can have more than one "team." To each their own but I'll never get it except in very specific cases like relocation or something.

 

[seventieslord]

well I say that and I am sure there people more creative than me that will fan a way, the winds of shit can blow hard when the shit barometer number get too low.

That's absolutely right Mister Lahey!

 

[sr edler]

2011 SCFs teams had a lot of genuine dicks on them, on both teams. I don't have to name the players, we all know who.

2024 Vancouver and Toronto are without these type of players, and no, Reaves and Tie Domi's son doesn't really count.

The only spin I can think of is that Toronto's own Dale Hunter, Morgan Rielly, is from Vancouver, which could create another (but still probably slightly different) Lucic scenario.

Maybe the Canada curse will be broken one day.

Ironically enough this iteration of the Canucks doesn't have much Canadian players, I guess it's just Juulsen, Soucy, Di Giuseppe, and the one and only Arshdeep Bains, two of those are locals though from Surrey.

Weren't Boston and Vegas both stacked with Canadians when they won their recent Cups?

 

[PrimumHockeyist]

I've never really had a second team that I root for. Rangers fan, and nothing else, probably until the day I die.

That being said, a small part of me will never forgive the franchise for

this is it, the migration must be authentic. just like the reason for staying with one team.

I grew up a Habs fan and it won me 6 Cups. Then, they seemed to change their identity so much in the early 80s that I was put off, just as Gretzky was ascending. Very naturally, I switched to Edmonton. That won me 4 more Cups. Somehow the LA trade didn't sit well, and I really, really wanted to see Mario prove his potential. 2 more cups there. Then loads of travel and 3 more with Sid.

Now I'm back with Edmonton
It's not a bad life on the other side mrhockey193195...

 

[solidmotion]

i grew up a leafs fan in the 90s and in spite of never really being a top team they were easy to like during the sundin era. cujo, belfour, tucker, roberts, mogilny, domi—fun players. then the burke-kessel-phaneuf era leafs were so depressing—just ugly, boring hockey—that by the 2010 playoffs i basically became a bandwagon hawks and kings fan. (i had toews and kopitar on my fantasy team.) that worked out well for the next five years. started to come back to the leafs during the matthews-marner era but much more casually. they're fun to watch now but still i can't see myself investing again unless and until they make the conference finals.

 

[kaiser matias]

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.

As someone a few years younger than you who also grew up a Canucks fan, this is exactly my thoughts as well.

Though you left out the best part of Naslund losing everything: it was the team's fan appreciation game, and he famously told the crowd after the game "We choked."

 

[NyQuil]

As a young child, it was Gretzky and the Oilers (like everyone), but when he was traded, my older brother and I changed teams in protest. For him, it was the Flames (?!) and for me it was the Rangers. As an adult, it's funny because you saw the same with Crosby and the Penguins. A lot of young kids in Ottawa with Pens jerseys.

I became a serious hockey fan with the New York Rangers until about the early 2000s. In my school, kids called me the "Lone Ranger" for my Rangers baseball cap. It was hard to find merchandise in Ottawa as they had very few household names. My Dad would buy me anything he would run across: a coffee mug or a keychain or a little Zamboni with the logo. When Messier ended up there, all of that changed.

My roommate made me take down that "Made in America" Brian Leetch poster in university during the 2002 Olympics. "You take it down, or I'm taking it down." I still have a rare White Lady Liberty Leetch jersey as well as the classic blue. He and (now) Alfredsson are probably my two favourite players.

Eventually, the hometown Ottawa Senators won me over. Part of it was the challenge of following an out-of-market team at the time. I'd see the Rangers a few times a year when they played on HNIC (or in the playoffs), or catch them at the Civic Center in Ottawa, and followed the box scores in the Ottawa Citizen.

I suspect it would be a lot easier nowadays to maintain your fandom for an out-of-market team with GameCenter and the easy availability of coverage on the internet.

In any event, I was exposed to and attended a lot of the Senators games, media, newspaper columns etc. and eventually just knew a lot more about that team. I also had the misfortune of living with 5 (!) Leafs fans during the Sens-Leafs series in the late 90s and early 2000s, and found myself in the unenviable position of defending the hometown team.

I ended up going to every home playoff game for the Senators 2003 playoff run and haven't missed more than one or two ever since.

Mrs_NyQuil had been a Leafs fan when we started dating in high school, as were one side of her family who were originally from Toronto. Her Mom had been in the stands for at least one of the games of the 1967 Leaf Cup win and still has the ticket stubs. My Dad and her Dad were both Habs fans. My Mom liked the Bruins because she came from the East Coast. We're all Senators fans now (as is my brother), but it took a little time.

Unlike a lot of expansion markets, Ottawa was full of hockey fans before the Senators returned, and while some switched right away, some took longer, and some (Habs, Leafs, Bruins in particular) have kept their old allegiances.

 

[DRW895]

I've never had even a "second team" (much less more) and I've never considered not rooting for the team that I've been rooting for since I was an even smaller child...

1. My favorite team
...
t-32nd. All other teams

Do you miss Quebec Nordiques rivalry?

 

[Michael Farkas]

Nope!

 

[The Panther]

Oh God, I do miss the Montreal - Quebec rivalry. When I was a kid, I just loved that window into French-Canadian culture and the intensity between those clubs.

The lone Quebec pro-team today has no identity and could belong to anywhere. It sucks.

 

[Gorskyontario]

Ironically enough this iteration of the Canucks doesn't have much Canadian players, I guess it's just Juulsen, Soucy, Di Giuseppe, and the one and only Arshdeep Bains, two of those are locals though from Surrey.

Well I'm specifically talking about no Canadian team winning since 1993, not really the composition of the teams themselves.

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

2024 Vancouver and Toronto are without these type of players, and no, Reaves and Tie Domi's son doesn't really count.

bertuzzi’s nephew does though

 

[VaporTrail]

I've been a Sabres fan for over 40 years, and the organizarion now has me alienated...Sucks I can't watch my team's games anymore.