Causes For Concern, For the Canucks Fan That Knows No Other Way

Don't Panic, Canucks Fans. There Are Still Plenty of Reasons to Panic.

Welcome to the stretch drive, the unpredictable and unstable back half of the NHL regular season. With All-Star weekend now in the rearview, the next break in the schedule is the part where it ends, and the looming conclusion to the campaign is enough to send teams and their fans into a tizzy. A win streak or an untimely losing skid can alter one's position faster than drawing a character card in Candyland. With so much on the line, the questions can come fast and furious. Are we good enough? Are we tough enough? Do we have enough depth? It's a nervous time.

Canucks fans should be used to this by now: we go through it every year. But, this year is different. This year, the Canucks appear to be in good standing, and there are seemingly few reasons to panic. Longtime fans could be forgiven for not quite knowing what to do with themselves. PITB is here for you. In the past, we've tried to inject perspective into the fanbase by Babcocking the Canucks, but this time, we need not dream up doomsday scenarios willy-nilly. These are real concerns. Here, for your masochistic pleasure, are a myriad of reasons to caress that familiar panic button--enough worries to make this whole situation feel delightfully familiar. Pure, abject terror after the jump.

Can the Canucks really win the President's Trophy? Vancouver has never finished on top of the league. Despite sharing the top spot, for the moment, with Philadelphia, they'll likely have to close out the season in record-setting fashion to keep it. The Canucks are currently on pace for an 112-point season. So are the Flyers. Can they hold them off? If not, can they win the Western Conference? Neither have the Canucks ever accomplished this feat. They currently hold a respectable 5-point lead over the second place Detroit Red Wings, but the Red Wings have won the West six times in their history, and twice in the last three years. When it comes to winning the conference, they have experience the Canucks don't.

How about that fourth line? This season alone, 12 separate guys have started a game in one of the three spots on the Canucks' fourth line. Some of these guys don't even play in the NHL anymore. The line has yet to develop any consistency or identity. The team has effectively gone the entire season without a fourth-line center. At times it's seemed like the Canucks have no idea what they want from the position at all.

Rick Rypien remains on leave for personal reasons. Will he come back? Will he come back in playing shape? Does the team even want him back? Will Alex Bolduc return? If he does, can he stay healthy? Is Aaron Volpatti ready for the playoff grind? In last year's playoffs, coach Alain Vigneault basically benched the entire fourth line in favour of a three-line rotation. The Canucks have said they don't want to repeat this, but with the questions surrounding their fourth line, one has to wonder how they'll suddenly become comfortable with the guys they've got. Apart from Tanner Glass, nobody appears to have the coach's trust.

The organization has called up Cody Hodgson. Is he going to play? Are they going to try him as the fourth-line center? I wonder if this is a bit of a gambit to see if the Canucks have an internal candidate before Mike Gillis targets a fourth-line center at the trading deadline. Every other guy on the farm who might be capable of filling the spot has seen a look, and nobody's stuck. Hodgson's really the last possible option down there. If he doesn't pan out this season, what's next?

What about the rest of the forward corps? The third line hasn't scored since the Jurassic period, and Ryan Kesler's linemates from last season have not been able to duplicate their success. Mason Raymond has gone cold, and Mikael Samuelsson has been spotty, leaving Kesler without a real scoring threat on his wing. He'll be an easy target in the playoffs if, when he's on the ice, he's the only forward teams have to worry about.

There are questions surrounding Kesler too. Kesler has a tendency to improve drastically in the back half of NHL seasons. The Canucks would dearly benefit from a continuation of this trend, but Kesler's really in uncharted waters here. He's an All-Star center now. He's third in the league in goals scored, having already surpassed his career-high in this regard. He and Daniel Sedin have scored nearly one-third of the Canucks' goals. The success of the team depends on Kesler continuing his torrid pace. Can he? Will Gillis make a splash at the deadline and perhaps acquire another scoring forward as insurance, or to complement him?

And once we're doing worrying about the forwards, let's look to the defense, where one could be forgiven for thinking things look somewhat bleak. Alex Edler has undergone a microdiskectomy and is projected to miss somewhere between eight weeks and the rest of the season. Will he return? If he does, will he return to form? What if he doesn't come back at all? A primary ingredient of the Canucks' success this season has been the consistency of their top two defensive pairings. Can the Canucks overcome the shake-up?

Can Keith Ballard fill in while Edler's away? Is either Chris Tanev or Lee Sweatt an NHL regular? They say Sami Salo is making strides, but he's still not strong enough to return. Nobody's certain he ever will be. Will Salo play this season at all? If Gillis feels that neither Salo nor Edler are going to return this season, does he trust the other guys to get it done or does he turn his attention to acquiring another depth defenceman?

HAVE YOU PRESSED THE PANIC BUTTON YET?

If not, good for you, because I think we're gonna be okay.

Happy Reminders in Lieu of Excuses

So the Canucks are on a losing streak.

As far as streaks go, anyone will tell you I'm more of a fan of the winning ones than the losing ones. Both are bound to happen in an 82-game schedule, and honestly, you can say before the season starts that the Canucks will win between 45 and 55 games this season, and lose between 27 and 37. It shouldn't bother us particularly when the losses come in a row.

Still, I like winning streaks better than losing streaks because I know the Canucks are a solid team, and I like hearing sportscasters and the like recognize them. It's cool to see them near the top of the power rankings, it's cool to hear people talk about how great their power play is. And the forums are always full of crazy, but it's happy crazy rather than panic crazy. I like happy crazy. It's more fun to say, "that's cool, but come on guys, Edler won't really win the Norris," than to say, "that's a drag, but come on guys, there are worse players out there than Bieksa."

I don't believe in excuses. I don't like making them, I don't like hearing them. I've always believed in owning up to your failures, acknowledging your mistakes, and truthfully assessing how likely they are to continue. "I've screwed up. I shouldn't have screwed up, but I did. I'll do my best in the future, and hopefully won't continue to screw up, because that's not acceptable." The Canucks don't seem to take to excuses, either, and I like that. I like that, when Canucks media suggest that maybe jet lag or fatigue or minor injury or bad officiating or the like may play a factor, the best they can hope for is "Maybe that's a factor but that's part of the game, and we need to do better." That's the truth about this losing streak.

The Canucks haven't been playing up to their potential. Sometimes they're still finding ways to win, but they aren't playing consistently, and they've won games they deserved to lose more often than they've lost games they deserved to win. They need to play better than they are, and it's likely that things will start to click.

Until then, we need to keep our spirits up. This is a temporary apocalypse, not a permanent one (like Z-day, but with a cure). While we wait, take a deep breath, and remember the following:

• Last season, all six of the Canucks' top two lines put up 25+ goal seasons. No other team could say that. All six of them have returned to the lineup.
• Roberto Luongo's "bad season" last year saw what was, for him, a low sv% of .913. For many teams, that's the ceiling of their goaltenders' ability. For the Canucks, it's the floor.
• Including Salo, the Canucks have six defensemen that are both defensively responsible and offensive threats every night.
• Henrik Sedin is coming off a Canucks single-season points record, and is the reigning Art Ross and Hart winner.
• Daniel Sedin is like a clone of Henrik Sedin that shoots more.
• Ryan Kesler has twice been a Selke finalist. Any team without Pavel Datsyuk is jealous of the Canucks for having Kesler.
• Alex Burrows brings a level of compete that few other NHLers ever do. He'll block shots, take hits, skate till his whole body cries out for relief, and then jump back on the ice to do it again the next shift. Basically, he is playoff hockey.
• One of the best two-way defensemen for the Canucks, Sami Salo, could return as early as December. The Canucks' record with Salo is dramatically better than it is without him.
  
• While Sami Salo would be returning from a big injury after a long period of time, no one is more experienced in coming back from injury than Sami Salo.
• The Canucks have a defenseman that's put up multiple seasons with over 40 points, is counted on night in and night out this season to silence the opposition's offense, and has done a pretty solid job, and is tougher than nutlog. Normally, such a man would be an indispensable piece of a team's core, but for the Canucks, he's not only expendable, he's likely to be traded. That's how crazy good the Canucks' defense corps is.
• The Canucks last season were using 7.2 million in cap space on a third line that just didn't get the job done. They are now spending 4.325 million on a third line that's much better.
  
• The Canucks will make the playoffs. No matter how bad the losing streak may be, the Canucks are still, ultimately, playoff-bound. While the team will never take this for granted, that's something we, as fans, can.
• Never before have the Canucks iced this complete a team.
• The Canucks' current head coach has won the Jack Adams award for best coach in the NHL. He's also won division titles coaching both defensive- and offensive-minded systems. What other coach can claim such versatility?
  
• Many analysts and experts have picked the Canucks to win it all this season, and for good reason.
• Even during the Canucks' win streak, when all the analysts were using the words "Vancouver" and "Stanley Cup" in sentences together all over the place, we hadn't seen the team at the top of their game. As Frank Sinatra once observed, "things will reach their apex sometime in the future."

So let go of the panic button and remember that good teams have bad nights. Nothing's going to keep the Canucks from the playoffs, and they're poised for a deep run. Ask yourself in the worst of moments, what would Bobby McFerrin do? I'll tell you what Bobby McFerrin would do: He wouldn't worry. Also, he'd be happy. And so should you.