A Vancouver Canuck conspiracy?

18Apr10

Check out this article from the Province newspaper this morning. Legitimate questions or sour grapes? Take a gander:

Tony Gallagher: Yet another game for conspiracy theorists

We all are learning to love conspiracy theories here in Vancouver with respect to hockey, so much so that we could be made honorary Americans who seem to celebrate the genre like nobody else.

So here goes, although sadly many Vancouver fans have suspected this one before.

Did you notice when the Montreal Canadiens were up big in their game against the Washington Capitals and were threatening to take a 2-0 series lead against the league’s most promoted team and most promoted player in Alex Ovechkin, they suddenly ran into a series of highly questionable penalties.

Odd how that happens, sort of reminds you of how a team threatening to take a big lead in nationally televised NBA game suddenly runs into weird offensive fouls and travelling violations while the trailing team seems to be able to pull a gun and not get a foul.

Finally there were enough power-play opportunities for the Caps to get the momentum back, the crowd into the game and eventually the New York office was breathing easier as the Caps evened the series at 1-1. At the NBC offices, they must have been nearing collective embolism.

Then Saturday night the Canucks jump to a 2-0 lead and appear to be all over the Kings threatening to make short work of a market some important people in the league would love to come back to hockey after eight years of missing the playoffs and an eternity since Wayne Gretzky made the sport pop in the second largest market in North America.

Suddenly, a couple of questionable calls, one to Andrew Alberts for apparently tripping Dustin Brown and then a hold on Pavol Demitra, when it’s abundantly obvious to most Canuck fans that the Slovak who shone so brightly at the Olympics is having trouble holding on to anything. Nothing too outrageous, but the team with all the momentum and threatening to finish this series quickly suddenly runs into a couple of questionable ones.

Third period in a 2-2 tie, another Alberts penalty when Wayne Simmonds cut into the middle generating what seems like the first stick foul called in the series although somehow the stick which stuck in Henrik Sedin’s visor was missed in Game 1.

Henrik appears to win a third-period race to prevent an icing but the refs don’t see it that way. Ryan Smyth’s high stick in overtime and no call? Just a follow-through? Good thing the overtime penalty given to L.A. to give them four out of their five goals scored in this series on the power play wasn’t contested by the Canucks.

Oh, it was ‘the wrong call’ according to Alain Vigneault who had looked at the tape before doing his post game. Well, you know, he lost. Just sour grapes right. Never mind that often even the most obvious fire drills at benches in overtime are overlooked. This one just didn’t happen to be overlooked.

And just like last year all the traffic in the crease of Roberto Luongo has yielded no calls but the goalie isn’t offering any opinions unless you think ‘I’m not a ref’ is an opinion.

These are all just coincidences we suspect. And that’s probably all it really is, although won’t you be just a little intrigued if the same thing should happen to the Nashville Predators if they threaten to go up 2-0 on the Chicago market tonight. Come on, work with us here.

Look, we’re just having some fun. Because to think things are really going down this way would cast serious aspersions on the officials involved in the games mentioned and we could never do that, not after watching for years when nothing like this would ever even occur to anyone.

They all just have too much class really to let pleasing your boss change the way they see a game. It’s just too much to take seriously. So we’re not doing that, never.

There are lots of reasons why the Canucks are even in this series, not the least of which is the fact Alberts has played 17 minutes and 32 seconds in this series and has 23 minutes in penalties. And Ryan Kesler says their indiscipline is ‘totally unacceptable,’ referring to the penalties which were not questionable in the series.

The Montreal game you’ll have to explain on your own.

© Copyright (c) The Province

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