Value Village All-Stars

The Canucks have champagne dreams on a beer budget

Jeff Vinnick/Vancouver Canucks

By TOM HAWTHORN -- SportsXtra

 Off the ice, away from the Rollerball-meets-Thunder-dome violence of the NHL, the Vancouver Canucks indulge in all the hedonistic wonders that Lotusland has to offer. Golf in January. The finest sushi this side of the Pacific. A ski hill within sight of downtown skyscrapers. Once they lay down the graphite weaponry of their trade, the stars of GM Place fade into the spectacular scenery.

 The Jeff Daniels-lookalike strolling along the Stanley Park seawall? That's Markus Naslund.

 The guy with the hedgehog hair fooling around with a bunch of kids on a suburban Coquitlam street? That's Trent Klatt.

 The big galoot with the doofus smile wrestling two little girls and Mr. Snappy in the Gator Pit at the upscale Park Royal shopping centre? That's Ed Jovanovski.

 In years gone past, the cushy life of the West Coast was blamed for turning Canucks into a bunch of pantywaist softies come playoff time. But these are not your father's Canuckleheads, the perennial also-rans. These are the Canucks of Brian Burke - the Harvard-trained lawyer with a pugnacious manner and a miser's heart, the Dr. Frankenstein of a monster club.

 "The No. 1 complaint that I got when I came back here was 'Your team doesn't work hard enough'," says Burke, who became general manager in 1998 on his second tour of duty with the team. "And the No. 2 complaint was 'Your team is grossly overpaid.' The salaries were $38.5 million (US). That's ridiculous. Five years later we're still not back at $38 million."

 Some NHL clubs seem immune to sticker shock. They shop like Lucille Ball on a bender. The Maple Leafs are Holt Renfrew, while the Canucks are strictly Value Village. Burke has a hamburger budget. He does not want to go cap-in-hand to owner/cellular zillionaire John McCaw to beg, "Please, sir, I want some more." Like baseball's Billy Beane of the Oakland A's, Burke competes against the deep-pocket clubs by spotting undervalued talent. Let some other chump pay retail. (Incidentally, Burke is not the only team tightwad. "Bert's wallet is like an onion," centre Brendan Morrison once confided about linemate Todd Bertuzzi. "Any time he opens it, he starts crying.")

 The Canucks of old got to the Stanley Cup finals twice, in 1982 and 1994. The first foray was a once-in-a-lifetime fluke-a-rama where the Disney script was scrapped the moment Harold Snepsts coughed up the puck in overtime of Game One, while the 1994 run was a legitimate challenge in which a narrow defeat was followed by a reliance on high-priced Russian mercenaries.

 As Nikita Khrushchev might have said, "We will Bure you."

 Alex Mogilny and Pavel Bure are long gone - and this year's edition racked up 104 points, the best showing in the franchise's history. Vancouver plays a gung-ho, all-out, trap-be-damned style of attacking hockey, a deliberate decision by a cash-strapped front office to keep well-heeled bums in seats at The Garage. The cash from the gate ensures the talent is not dispersed at garage sale prices.

 The Canucks still have their moments. In the opening round of the playoffs last season, they took a two-games-to-none lead over the Red Wings and seemed poised for a defining upset. Then, goalie Dan Cloutier had a brain cramp in Game 3 and Niklas Lidstrom scored from centre ice. The Canucks bowed out with four straight losses.

 In the last game of the regular season, a trademark Naslund wrister clanging off a goal post likely cost the team captain the Art Ross Trophy for points and the team a division title (and a first-round matchup against the Minnesota Wild, whose place was taken by the fearsome St. Louis Blues). But afterlosing three of the first four playoff games to the Blues, the Canucks won three straight to advance past the first round for the first time in eight years.

 "Coming back from 3-1 is hard to do," Burke said after the Game 7 victory. "It showed character, persistence, chemistry and determination. What we did as a team was a big step toward the future of this team regardless of what happens for the rest of the playoffs. It's only the first step, but a big step."

 This lineup is set to be around for awhile. Jovanovski and veteran fan fave Trevor Linden were signed just before the All-Star break, while Naslund is committed until 2005.

 Vancouver's hockey fans - a notoriously fickle lot - have warmed to these Canucks, selling out GM Place on 39 of 41 regular season dates. In the past they have jeered Doak and Kearns, Momesso and Murzyn. They have booed Bure and mocked Mogilny. They even booed Team Canada during a loss to the Soviet Union in 1972, which led to sweat-bathed Phil Esposito's famous post-game "Jeez" monologue. Mind you, long-suffering Canucks fans have had to endure downhill-skate crests, hideous Halloween sweaters, trivia-question draft picks and too many trades of the our-future-hall-of-famer-for-your-overpaid-overrated-and-over-the-hill-veteran variety.

 "Knowledgeable, intense fans," says Burke, whose first big move was giving The Russian Rocket a new launching pad in Florida.

Jeff Vinnick/Vancouver Canucks

 Coming the other way was Ed Jovanovski, the 6-foot-2, 210-pound bashing defenceman. My-way-or-the-highway coach Mike Keenan was shown the on-ramp to the Trans-Canada Highway to be replaced by Marc Crawford.

 The Sedin twins, Daniel and Henrik, were sel-ected second and third in the 1999 entry draft. Morrison came from the New Jersey Devils by trading Mogilny. Other trades brought in Cloutier, Linden and Sami Salo. Burke had inherited centre Matt Cooke and top defencemen Mattias Ohlund, Brent Sopel and Bryan Allen from the entry draft, as well as Naslund and Bertuzzi, acquired through trades. Naslund has scored 41, 40 and 48 goals in the past three seasons. As for Bertuzzi, once he's parked in the slot, he is as unmovable and as prolific as a centre in a tabletop hockey game.

 Free agency has brought in backup goalie Peter Skudra and such role players as Murray Baron, Nolan Baumgartner and Mats Lindgren. The Canucks have not been built on the open market.

 What many of the Canucks share is a history of winning championships. Artem Chubarov scored the overtime goal for Russia over Canada to win the 1999 world junior gold medal; Klatt won a college hockey title; even Jarkko (The Scrabble Nightmare) Ruutu got a taste of the Olympics with the Finnish team.

 A turning point for the club and the architect who constructed it came when Burke spoke to the team at Christmas in 2001. The players were sitting in the dressing room. "We were dreadful," Burke said. "We weren't playing well." He remembers the players listened with rapt attention.

 He reminded them to avoid dumb penalties and yadda yadda et cetera et cetera. More important was his promise to leave the core of the Canucks team alone. "I'm either the smartest bastard in Western Canada," he told the team he had assembled, "or the dumbest." It wasn't Knute Rockne, Burke admits, but it seemed to work. The Canucks have been on a tear ever since.

 The players share a sense of unfinished business. No one is in a hurry to hit any bike trails or a local golf course. (Least of all Burke, who'd rather leap from the Lions Gate Bridge than take up golf. "It's too slow, there is no fighting and I already know how to swear," he once said.) The Canucks started the season as 20-1 dark horses for the Stanley Cup, entered the playoffs at 9-1. For his part, Burke has already beaten the odds. He has put together a team as spectacular as the city in which it plays.

 -- With files from Kevin Woodley