The Presidents' Trophy Matters (For, Like, One More Week)

Stop clapping, damn it! Aside from the thing they won, they haven't won anything!

By now, you've probably heard the news that the Canucks have won the Presidents' Trophy. You've probably also heard some of the subsequent chatter surrounding the merit of the accomplishment. You may have heard, for instance, that this trophy doesn't matter, that only playoff success matters. That is patently false, and you likely heard it from fools.

Rather than explain why, I'll turn things over to Tom Benjamin, who recently debunked the crap out of this crackpot theory:

While there is no doubt that the big prize of any season is the Stanley Cup, its foolish to denigrate other accomplishments in the hockey season, be it the President’s Trophy or even a Divisional title. The more we diminish the regular season, the less reason any of us has to watch.

What he said. Regular season accomplishments may not be playoff accomplishments, but they are still noteworthy accomplishments. Ryan Lambert of Puck Daddy argues winning the Presidents' Trophy might even be more impressive than winning the Stanley Cup:

[...] don't get me wrong, I love the playoffs for all the drama that the ping-pong-ball probability brings. But the value placed on them, rather than the regular season, seems far too great to be reasonable. Winning in the playoffs isn't everything. In fact, it's occasionally a complete fluke. You don't get Edmonton/Carolina Cup Finals otherwise.

Yeah, winning the Stanley Cup is a pretty cool accomplishment, and one that should obviously be celebrated to some extent. But to also denigrate beating the hell out of everyone you play for 82 games? That's just stupid. Because winning the Presidents' Trophy is a more impressive achievement.

He might be hyperbolizing slightly, but he's got a point. The Stanley Cup has achieved a level of importance so vast that regular-season accomplishments are, comparatively, worth squat. That's not how it should be. Winning the regular season is a huge deal. Considering that it's technically harder to win than the Stanley Cup, it's silly to pretend it means nothing.

Consider, for example, the Olympics and the World Championships in any sport. The world championships may often be considered the last big tuneup before the Olympics, but nobody scoffs at a world champion just because he or she didn't win an Olympic gold medal. Yes, people place more value on the Olympics, but winning at the World Championships is far from meaningless.

You may have also heard someone espouse the theory behind The Presidents' Trophy curse, a laughable belief that being the winningest regular-season team means a postseason of cuplessness and utter damnation. Jonathan Willis recently debunked the crap out of this crackpot theory:

[Since 1994] the Presidents’ Trophy winner [has been] the most successful team, being:

• eliminated in the first round the fewest number of times
• eliminated in the second round the fewest number of times
• the Stanley Cup champion more frequently than any other seed
• in the Finals three times as often as the second seed
  

[...] Given that the Presidents’ Trophy slot is obviously the most favourable position, why do we create factually vacuous phantoms like the ‘Presidents’ Trophy Curse?'

Okay, so not only does the Presidents' Trophy matter, but it's actually a predictor of success. It is unquestionably worth celebrating, and usually means a pretty decent postseason run is on the horizon.

That said, as soon as the postseason actually starts, it stops mattering.

With that in mind, the Canucks might want to get that banner up lickety-split. The team will be awarded the trophy in a ceremony before their final regular season home game on Thursday, and it would be wisdom to prepare to raise the banner that same day. If they wait until next season, it either goes up alongside a Stanley Cup banner or it goes up without it. If it's the former, no one will care about a Presidents' Trophy banner. If it's the latter, people will just resent it, and we'll be subjected to more silliness about how it doesn't matter.

However, if you raise it on Thursday, there's a possibility that the banner--and the accomplishment it represents--will receive the fanfare it deserves.

The Awful Human Being Quiz Will Suss Out the Awful Human Beings

Most Canuck fans are good people. They just want to see their team win, and they're pretty used to that not happening. As a result, they're resigned, they're relaxed, and they have a tendency to keep their heads. Unfortunately, they are only the majority of Canucks fans, which means that, somewhere, there is a minority of insane, violent, awful human beings who happen to share a love for Vancouver's hockey team.

A word to this minority: we don't want you. You're bad. Go elsewhere.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: am I bad? Am I an awful human being? Perhaps. But we at PITB don't just want to leave you in the dark. We would like very much to help identify you. And then shun you.

With that in mind, we spent the weekend creating this very scientific quiz, which should help to evaluate how awful you are. It's only three questions long, so you should know if you're an awful human being within five minutes:

1. It's 1994. The Canucks have just fallen one goal short of winning the Stanley Cup, bringing great pride to the city of Vancouver with a performance for the ages. Do you:

a) Congratulate the team on making Vancouver proud

b) Destroy Vancouver

2. It's 2004. Todd Bertuzzi has just broken Steve Moore's neck. Do you:

a) Blame the guy who broke a guy's neck
b) Blame the guy whose neck just got broken

3. It's 2011. Theoren Fleury has just espoused his opinion that the Canucks are primed for a first-round playoff upset. Do you:
a) Respectfully disagree with him
b) Enable child molesters by persecuting a victim for speaking out about it

Yeah, if you answered B to any one of these three questions, we'd prefer if you took your fandom elsewhere. Oh. And if you answered B to all three, you're clearly Satan.

By the by, if you're a non-awful Vancouver fan with a question you think might help skim out the dreck, by all means, leave it in the comments.

The Canucks Did Not Give Up On Michael Grabner

From the I-Can't-Believe-This-Has-to-Be-Said Files:

Michael Grabner is having a fabulous rookie season for the New York Islanders. The former Canuck is now leading the New York Islanders in goalscoring, but that's not quite eye-opening enough. How's this: with his hattrick last night, Michael Grabner now has more goals than Alex Ovechkin, Jarome Iginla, and Patrick Marleau. He's currently tied with Logan Couture for the most goals amongst rookies, has a five-game goalscoring streak, and has helped the Islanders to three straight wins with 7 goals in those victories.

It is at this point that Canucks fans and media start to take notice, pointing out that Grabner would be third in goals on the Canucks, just 5 behind Daniel Sedin. Heck, he has more than twice as many goals as Mason Raymond, the Canuck he is most often compared to. And so, there are a few people inclined to ask the question, "Why did the Canucks give up on Michael Grabner?" One such person, unsurprisingly, is Brad Ziemer, who goes so far as to say that "giving up on Grabner [was] a big...mistake."

It's not just that it's a dumb question; it's a flawed question. The entire premise is completely and totally wrong. The Canucks did not "give up"on Grabner.

It's called a trade. You give something, you get something. Trading a player is not giving up on a player. Giving up on a player would be something like waiving him with the knowledge that another team will likely pick him up. Like what Florida did. The Canucks, on the other hand, recognized his value, but put more stock in shoring up their depth on defense, an area that has hurt the Canucks in recent years.

The Canucks are currently leading the NHL in goals scored. A pure goalscorer like Michael Grabner is not what they need. The Canucks are currently missing 3 of their regular top-six defensemen. Depth on defense is what they need. Is this a hard concept to understand? The Canucks traded away something they didn't need for something they do need.

Would it be nice to still have Grabner? Of course. He showed decent chemistry with Kesler and Raymond last season and would have been a nice fit on the second line. Do the Canucks particularly miss Grabner? No. Did they make the trade with the understanding that he had the potential to score 30+ goals in the NHL? Yes.

To be fair to Canucks fans, they have been particularly ruthless to Ziemer on this topic, but for the wrong reasons. They instead say that Grabner is getting an opportunity with the Islanders that he wouldn't have in Vancouver, which is only partially true. Grabner is averaging only 14:03 per night on the island, which is about right for a borderline second line player getting mostly third line minutes. He's barely getting any powerplay time and only 1 of his 24 goals was on the powerplay. Quite frankly, he could easily be playing in the same spot that Jeff Tambellini has filled this season, moving up to the second line at times and filling in on the third and fourth lines as needed. Unlike the situation with Brendan Morrison at center, the Canucks don't have a logjam of wingers that would have prevented Grabner from finding a spot.

But that completely misses the point: the Canucks did not give up on Michael Grabner. They traded him. There is a distinct difference. They traded away a valuable asset for a different type of valuable asset and I am certain that Mike Gillis does not consider it a mistake. I don't either.