Hit the post
I have your gold medal Zippy!
That’s like taking your cousin to your high school prom after asking the girl you liked in school turned you down.
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Not that it necessarily happened to me.
Zombo and I aren’t related for one.[VIDEO] Mark Messier, The Anti-Canuck - A 20-Minute Look At His Catastrophic Time in Vancouver
- Thread starter CambieKev
- Start date
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Not that it necessarily happened to me.
Zombo and I aren’t related for one.
RobertKron
Registered User
- Sep 1, 2007
- 15,477
- 8,575
The dislike of Messier has little to so with his point production. Guy acted like a complete piece of shit while he was here. Was a shitty teammate. Meddled in front office decisions. If he'd just come in and been mediocre on the ice that would have been whatever.
TraderJim
Um.. like.. you know
- Apr 18, 2006
- 1,105
- 1,502
Reading stats off of a page is the equivalent of judging a player by their plus/minus. You clearly don't know shit and haven't read up on anything before coming here with your standard un-educated opinion.
Hit the post
I have your gold medal Zippy!
I didn't expect Messier to be Arthur Morgan in his prime. Would've even accepted an early Jonah Hex. Instead, we got the senior citizen version of Hec Ramsey.
Arthur Morgan
Registered User
Was he That bad? I was pretty young back in that time only watched leafs I was living in a small bubble back then
Arthur Morgan
Registered User
Was he seriously that bad? I mean he was like 36 or older at the time. how much did u guys expect out of him. They didn't name a trophy after him for no reason.
Hit the post
I have your gold medal Zippy!
Father time hits everyone (he was no exception). I might've cut him alot more slack had he not given the impression he was here to 'right the ship'.
I don't blame him for taking the millions (he didn't put a gun to anybody's head). Problem was, we were a team that operated under a smaller internal budget back when there was no cap.
Arthur Morgan
Registered User
To be fair I was about 9 year old when he signed with the Canucks I didnt watch the canucks lol.
I watched some of the 20min video. hard to base my opinion off a single game. and I try not to take fans too serious. Canuck fan's always seem to over react to things.
Looks like he wasn't a great person to have on the business side of things, but his on ice performance was still pretty good given his age.
Maybe you guy's should be mad at management for allowing him to get involved like he did. He obviously wanted the team to get better just had the wrong idea of it and too bad for you guy's Vancouver management allowed it to happen.
RobertKron
Registered User
- Sep 1, 2007
- 15,477
- 8,575
I mean the guy also put up like 3 more ~20g seasons after he left, so it's not like the wheels had just completely fallen off by the time he got here. Also, IIRC, he was playing with Pavel Bure.
I can't remember what game it was, but at some point there was a line brawl - everyone's dropped them, maybe the goalies are getting into it, and then the camera pans out and the toughest, meanest, Greatest Leader of All Time Mark motherf***ing Messier is just like skating around by himself like a six year old at Sunday afternoon public skate.
I can't remember what game it was, but at some point there was a line brawl - everyone's dropped them, maybe the goalies are getting into it, and then the camera pans out and the toughest, meanest, Greatest Leader of All Time Mark motherf***ing Messier is just like skating around by himself like a six year old at Sunday afternoon public skate.
With all due respect, you’re on your 2nd time around the toilet bowl now.
Your first Post started out by insulting the Canucks fan base and then your follow ups were even more condescending.
Upon being corrected and called out, you admitted that you are uninformed and just going on limited information, implying your age was a factor in your lack of understanding.
Now you’re trying to advise us on where the blame actually should go & how we should feel, when you obviously still do not understand the situation.
Please stop.
As the saying goes, “A person who can admit they’re all wrong when they’re all wrong, is an alright person.”
Ah I see, so it's his fault that the team that operated on a "smaller internal budget" decided to blow their wad on a guy that they thought was worth the dough thanks to his previous successes. Also I seem to recall that it was the TEAM that kept suggesting that Messier was here to "right the ship"...
It was pretty widely reported at the time he was living in Point Roberts (so did Mogilny, I believe, and of course Tortorella, and Kekuta Manneh when he played for the Whitecaps for U.S. citizenship reasons, etc.). A pad in Yaletown as a pied-à-terre to crash after games (or bring women to or whatever) hardly invalidates that.
Hit the post
I have your gold medal Zippy!
Watching Messier and 'Iron Mike Keenan' hoist the Cup after the seventh game of the '94 final, and knowing that within a few short years they'ed be reunited in VanCity on some truly awful teams, is almost more than a long-time Canuck fan can endure.
And of course it heralded the firing of Quinn and the departure of Linden. Although I guess we do have Keenan to thank for the Islanders trade that brought in Bertuzzi and Bryan McCabe, who eventually was turned into one of the Sedins.
And of course it heralded the firing of Quinn and the departure of Linden. Although I guess we do have Keenan to thank for the Islanders trade that brought in Bertuzzi and Bryan McCabe, who eventually was turned into one of the Sedins.
Hit the post
I have your gold medal Zippy!
LuckyDay
Registered User
The team was bad and overpaid but many fans didn't realize it. Messier was at the core of a necessary rebuild over one of our most beloved lineups. We forgive and credit Mike Keenan now for it but we refuse to credit Messier. I recall we were leading in faceoffs and goals for in the league in the history of this team. We really had too many chiefs and that mainly meant Trevor and Messier - Trevor was leaking the shenanigans to the media such as Messier's involvement with management decisions and Keenan screaming at him in the locker room. Jeff Brown and Kirk MacLean's careers were pretty much over and the giveing of guys like Cliff Ronning and Momesso by Quinn weren't something we could recover from. We also had a very disgruntled Pavel Bure who couldn't play on the same line as Mogilny - it was either one or the other, and they both needed to be on the top line to produce.
Bure played marvelous with Messier as he taught the team to go East/West on two-on-ones, especially in the neutral zone. This meant the lone D couldn't choose a rusher without the other one getting a breakaway with no chance to recover. He also taught this to Naslund when Bure sat out (Pavel probably had his recurring knee injury that needed healing which wasn't ever talked about while he sat).
Messier also taught the defense that Officials almost never call a 3rd penalty on 5 on 3 situations and Adrian Aucoin took this to heart. Aucoin pounded the crap out of those power play units. At one point, we were running 90% on the PK at 5 on 3, better than our 5 on 4's.
Messier also had Roger Neilson fired when he was coach on the Rangers. This didn't sit well with me or any Canucks fans who were paying attention. I'm not sure if that's when Keenan was brought in. Messier later had a spat with Neil Smith and got him fired as GM. I'm not certain of his relationship with Glen Sather - but most Oilers players (including Gretzky - and Gretzky never said squat about coaches because he accidentally got one fired as a junior) didn't have kind words about him. Best leader in sports!
Bure played marvelous with Messier as he taught the team to go East/West on two-on-ones, especially in the neutral zone. This meant the lone D couldn't choose a rusher without the other one getting a breakaway with no chance to recover. He also taught this to Naslund when Bure sat out (Pavel probably had his recurring knee injury that needed healing which wasn't ever talked about while he sat).
Messier also taught the defense that Officials almost never call a 3rd penalty on 5 on 3 situations and Adrian Aucoin took this to heart. Aucoin pounded the crap out of those power play units. At one point, we were running 90% on the PK at 5 on 3, better than our 5 on 4's.
Messier also had Roger Neilson fired when he was coach on the Rangers. This didn't sit well with me or any Canucks fans who were paying attention. I'm not sure if that's when Keenan was brought in. Messier later had a spat with Neil Smith and got him fired as GM. I'm not certain of his relationship with Glen Sather - but most Oilers players (including Gretzky - and Gretzky never said squat about coaches because he accidentally got one fired as a junior) didn't have kind words about him. Best leader in sports!
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I know it's a 'what-if' debate....but I seriously wonder if the Canucks had won game #7 in Madison Square Garden in '94 and claimed the Cup, would either Messier or Keenan (or both) have ever ended up in VanCity?
Somehow I doubt it.
Somehow I doubt it.
RandV
It's a wolf v2.0
Yeah that's what most people outside of Vancouver liked to say but I've never bought that message. A bit tougher to get into or remember details as this was a few years before everyone started getting on message boards, and personally the winter before the Messier signing was when I turned from a casual bandwagon fan to hardcore fan, but at the very least you can look at the team with hindsight.
And what do you see? The old message was it was a stale core past it's glory that needed a tear down... and not buying that. In the 4 years between the Cup run and Messier I count 9 players still on the roster: Bure(26), Lumme(31), Hedican(27), Linden(27), Gelinas(27), Babych(36), Murzyn(30), Odjik(26), and McLean(31). That's hardly anything remotely similar to what we had 4 years after the 2011 run, the only impact nostalgia player we needed to move on from was MacLean and most of the rest were still mid 20's.
Rather, what you see is a mediocre team that needed to be built back up. Very strong on the wing, pretty decent on defense, for that season at least would be decent in goal with Artus Irbe, and finally badly lacking down the middle. Two years prior we lost Ronning to free agency. The year before we had Mike Ridley as the top center who did okay with 52 points, but not sure what happened to him. That's why ownership paid Messier so much, they were expecting to get an all-star centerman (which he was up to this point) as that is what was really needed to put the team back into the playoff picture. Not to contend, just playoffs, because in those days it was pretty much impossible to 'contend' if you weren't New Jersey/Colorado/Detroit/Dallas.
You can never tell but I imagine there was a path available that dumping millions into Messier to take a **** on the team and blow it all up. Say for example...
- don't lose Cliff Ronning (why did we let him walk again?)
- sign Dave Gagner instead of Messier, later to be replaced with Cassels
- don't piss off Bure
- go with Irbe
- don't lose Aucoin/Scatchard/Walker
Main outline of the team could look something like:
Naslund-Gagner/Cassels-Bure
Gelinas-Ronning-Mogilny
Schaefer-Linden-Walker
Cooke-Scatchard-Muckalt
Lumme-Ohlund
Hedican-Aucoin
?-Sopel
Irbe
?
Not going to beat Colorado/Detroit but I'd imagine they'd do pretty well in the late 90's.
Mr. Canucklehead
Kitimat Canuck
We do? You won’t find many people willing to say anything good about Keenan. He lucked into a great trade with the benefit of hindsight (the Linden for Bertuzzi/McCabe/3rd deal) but just brutal return on investment for other players and his destruction of the team’s culture took a long while to build back up.
97-98:
3rd last in the NHL (11th out of 26 in GF)
98-99:
2nd last in the NHL (23rd out of 27 in GF)
99-00:
18th out of 28 in the NHL (14th out of 28 in GF)
I can’t find league face off stats in that timeframe, but we certainly were not an offensive league leader. And even if we won a lot of face offs, that did not translate to any sort of team success.
You have a source for this claim, I presume? Because there are two sources refuting it. Tony Gallagher said multiple Canuck players who refused to be named but were not Linden leaked the story, and Gino Odjick has gone on record talking about it multiple times.
A vaunted leader such as Messier should have easily been able to steer the ship, no? The best leader in professional hockey? The guy who played on teams of all stars and hall of famers for his whole career? I must have missed when the Rangers needed to ship out Bryan Leetch and Mike Richter to make room for “one leader”. This whole argument that Messier couldn’t lead the room unless Trevor Linden was gone never has and never will hold water.
These are fair points. Letting Ronning walk was the first domino to fall in how we ended up with Messier in the first place, as the Canucks were hoping to secure Gretzky and had to fall back on Messier when that plan blew up in their faces. I love Quinn, but he wasn’t without his missteps.
Failing to maximize any sort of return for McLean or Brown (or others) exacerbated our issues, though.
Also a fair point - but then, that should have contributed to a more balanced offensive attack...if everything else hadn’t gone to hell.
Good Lord. Bure was miraculous with anyone who played with him - but where in the world do you get the idea he taught Naslund anything? Naslund certainly gives credit to Messier for teaching him a lot about being a professional, but he has never once mentioned any sort of mentoring from Bure. And stylistically speaking, Naslund and Bure’s offensive games could not be more different.
I feel like a broken record - your source for this is...what? Messier was utterly abysmal defensively here. One could reasonably argue at least he was among the offensive leaders on the team. But fans, players and media types alike agree he was lacking in defensive effort or prowess.
Contrary to what we would like to believe, things aren’t black and white. While Keenan and Messier are the two biggest villains in Canucks history, but they have their fans. Naslund gives a lot of credit to Messier as I mentioned above, and Bertuzzi is fond of Keenan as a coach (while he reviles the more beloved Marc Crawford).
Things began to turn around for the Canucks in the 1999-2000 season when Brian Burke, a competent GM, was brought in to steer the ship. Firing Keenan and restoring a culture of team accountability and community responsibility are what started the rise out of the basement. While one of the vital players in that group attributes some of the success to Messier, the real architect of the Canucks’ 2000s resurgence was Burke.
