Declining numbers don’t always mean declining fortunes for an NHL captain known as a sniper. In 1997, 1998, and 2002, Steve Yzerman led Detroit to the Stanley Cup, but only scored 85, 69 and 48 points respectively in the regular season. Those numbers were a far cry from his best year (155 points in 1988-89), […]

Maybe Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” should have been the theme song of the Vancouver Canucks intrasquad game at Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre in Victoria, BC on September 16. The sold-out crowd of 7,006 had lots of love for their heroes, present and future, who showed off their skills over three 25-minute periods (played mostly in real time, […]

At the 2004 World Championship, a senior IIHF official confessed to me that he barely knew anything about Matt Cooke prior to the tournament in Prague and Ostrava, but by the end, he was wowed by the relentless, effective physical play of this Vancouver winger en route to Canadian gold. Earlier that same spring, Cooke […]

After the final on-ice sessions at Bear Mountain Arena in Victoria, how impressed was Vancouver Canucks head coach Alain Vigneault with the performance of Jannik Hansen? Just count the number of times Vigneault said “really” when asked to assess the speedy 21-year-old Danish winger to date. “He’s really impressed me,” Vigneault said. “He’s really strong […]

This weekend, I’ll bring HockeyAdventure.com readers some reports from the Vancouver Canucks training camp in Victoria. The BC provincial capital also happens to be where I grew up, and the Canucks and Los Angeles Kings both held camps in Victoria in the late 1980’s and early 90’s at the old Memorial Arena (now replaced by […]

A hockey team that disagrees about its fundamental direction on the opening day of training camp is about as common as an infatuated couple that gets into a fistfight on a first date. Pretty rare stuff, in other words. And so when the Vancouver Canucks brought out their head coach and veteran players to meet […]

Here’s a breakdown of Vancouver’s 49-man roster to kick off training camp on September 12. By Country Austria: 1 Canada: 29 Czech Republic: 1 Denmark: 1 Finland: 1 Slovakia: 3* Sweden: 6 USA: 7** Barring a trade or free agent signing, no Russians will appear on Vancouver’s opening-night roster for the second straight year. The […]

With the news that Aaron Miller will undergo abdominal surgery on the eve of the Vancouver Canucks training camp, Canucks fans will have to hope this doesn’t point to a recurring pattern. Ditto for GM Dave Nonis, who signed Miller to a one-year, $1.5 million deal on July 9, and, naturally, Miller himself. The veteran […]

NHLers, as a rule, are very accommodating interview subjects, even with buses and planes to catch, PR guys hovering nervously in the background, and sometimes a ridiculously repetitive stream of post-game questions from reporters. (After a Chicago game last season, I witnessed Martin Havlat giving almost the same answer verbatim about five times in a […]

Originally published in Full Tilt in 2006 By Lucas Aykroyd Vancouver has changed drastically over the last 10 years. Back in 1995, there was only one Skytrain line, no giant Future Shop downtown, and no wireless Internet access at Blenz. Nobody had heard of Nickelback, leading restaurants like West and Feenie’s didn’t exist, about 50,000 […]