Forsberg a Bust

The Colorado Avalanche  were knocked out of the playoffs last night at the hands of Johan Franzen and the Detroit Red Wings and, surprise surprise, Peter Forsberg was no where in sight.

He was injured.  Again.  In a series against the most lethal offence in the league, Forsberg was in the press box with a back injury.  He was plagued with a groin injury and a back injury in the playoffs, and as a result, missed almost the entire series against Detroit.

Now, having him in the line up wouldn’t have made much of a difference.  The Wings were going to win.  They have a more potent attack, they control the puck in every area of the rink and their defence are by far the best team in the NHL when it comes to making that first pass out of the zone.  Their goaltending is better too.  And yes, Chris Osgood is better than Dominik Hasek.

What is most troublesome about this whole situation with Forsberg is that the Avs put all their eggs in one basket.  They signed a guy with a long history of injuries that keep him in and out of the line up every three or four days, something that disrupts the evenflow of a team.

What was Avs general manager Francois Giguere thinking when he signed Forsberg for $1 million to play the last third of the regular season and only seven of 10 playoff games.  Why sign a guy who is the furthest thing from durable for that kind of money? 

Was the fact that he spent almost 10 months in his home country of Sweden while nursing a foot injury not a sign that his time as an NHL player has passed by?

Simply put, Forsberg was a bust.  His acquisition was stupid in the first place.  It was ill-advised, and there are more players out there who could’ve come into the Avalanche for less money and no one would have to worry about their durability.  Forsberg, in 16 total games with the Avs this year, racked up 19 points.  That’s not bad, but no one remembers how many points you get when you’re in and out of the press box because your constantly injured and aren’t in the line up when it matters the most.

Canucks former general manager Dave Nonis was canned for his lack of signing Peter Forsberg just days before the trade deadline and his lack of trading Ryan Kesler, Mason Raymond, Alex Edler and a first, second and third round draft pick in this year’s draft.  He got fired for sticking to his guns and not relying on a plan that has as much chance to blow up in your face as it does to succeed.  Giguere should get canned today for his taking a risk on a player that can’t get into the elevator to go to the press box without tweaking a groin or hurting his back.

Bringing Forsberg back was the stupidest decision made this year by a general manager.  It was pointless.  It was a waste of money and a roster spot that could’ve been better spent. 

New Canucks general manager Mike Gillis.  Don’t sign Forsberg.

Forsberg Back in Colorado

For all that it’s worth, Peter Forsberg has come back to the NHL after spending three-quarters of the season in Sweden nursing an injured foot.

The lucky, or unlucky, team that Forsberg has sided with is the 10th place in the Western Conference Colorado Avalanche.

The following is nothing against Forsberg, because he was great, and nothing against the Avs because they have won a Stanley Cup in the past decade, while the Minnesota Wild, Edmonton Oilers, Calgary Flames and Vancouver Canucks have not.

This move by Colorado may look good on paper, but in reality, this deal makes absolutely no sense.

Around this time last week, Forsberg and his agent both said that it was unlikely that the Swede would return to the NHL this season due to his injured foot that has caused him nothing but trouble while trying to rehabilitate it with the Swedish national team earlier this NHL season.  Now, all of the sudden, after seeming hell bent on not coming back this season, his foot is suddenly good enough to withstand competitive hockey for the next month-and-a-half and maybe the playoffs.

One issue that makes this deal look like nothing more than a team trying to grab the headlines away from Mats Sundin and the Toronto Maple Leafs is that Forsberg simply doesn’t have the juice anymore to compete in the NHL.  If it’s not his foot, it’s a shoulder or back or wrist or hand injury that keeps the former superstar on injury reserve and thus disrupting the chemistry or flow that the players in the line-up have by bringing him in and out of the line-up.

A week ago, Forsberg believed his foot just couldn’t hold up in the NHL.  Was that not a red flag with sirens sign from the Hockey Gods that this guy is untouchable by his own withdrawal?

By signing a guy like Forsberg, the Avs have put all their eggs into one basket.  Whether or not Forsberg stays healthy and plays well – which in itself is a question mark for a guy who has missed three-quarters of the season with a foot injury (for those that don’t know, you need healthy feet to actually hold you upright on the ice and help propel a person in any direction on the ice) – won’t hide the fact that Colorado doesn’t have the defence or the goaltending to make a serious run at the Stanley Cup.

The Avs have 172 goals-for this season, despite missing names like Joe Sakic, Ryan Smyth and Paul Stastny.  Not bad.  Okay, here is where the old cliche kicks in.  Defence wins championships.  Well, Colorado has allowed 174 goals-against this season.  Jose Theodore and Peter Budaj have, for the most part, platooned the goaltending duties in Colorado, and although their numbers combined are terrible, they’re not good enough to compete with the likes of Roberto Luongo and the Marty Turco in the west.

Instead of looking for a quick fix and short-term inspiration by signing Forsberg, perhaps Avalanche vice president and general manager Francois Giguere may have been better off by picking up a goalie or a defenseman to help this team keep pucks out of the net.  They don’t need scoring, they need a defender.

Forsberg isn’t either, not anymore.

Trade Rumour A Source of Hilarity

As I was driving around Port Coquitlam, B.C. today, I found myself in absolute hysterics, laughing so hard that I am sure the people in the cars beside me thought I was crazy.

What made me laugh so hard? 

Are you ready for this?

The newest trade rumour has the Vancouver Canucks trading Ryan Kesler, Luc Bourdon, Cory Schneider and a first-round pick in this year’s NHL Entry Draft to the Toronto Maple Leafs for Mats Sundin.

I’ll pause until you finish laughing…

Okay time is up.

The most ridiculous thing is, according to the poll question on the Team 1040 this afternoon, is that 13 per cent of people out there believe the Canucks should actually throw away four prospects to the Leafs for a 36-year-old center. 

It looks good on paper but paper does not do reality any justice.  If we were to look at the difference between how good a team is on paper compared to reality, lets look at the 1997 Vancouver Canucks roster, which included the likes of Trevor Linden, Pavel Bure, Mark Messier, Alex Mogilny and Kirk McLean, just to name a few.  That team fell apart half way through the season and the Canucks failed to make the playoffs. 

Difference between paper and reality.

Reality.  As much as Luc Bourdon has failed to impress those in Canuck land despite having played well for a kid in his position, you need him right now.  Why?  Well, incase you haven’t noticed, the Canucks defence corps can’t seem to stay healthy.  If and when the Canucks defence gets healthy is the grossly overused phrase in the city today.  Even if they did all (Kevin Bieksa, Willie Mitchell, Aaron Miller and Lukas Krajicek) come back, Sami Salo is almost a sure bet to go down, and that’s not a knock him, that’s just the reality of it.

And why on earth would you want to rid yourself of Kesler?  Okay, so he doesn’t have the offensive numbers that everyone expects out of him, but he does a whole helluva lot for this hockey club.  Next to Daniel and Henrik Sedin, he is the most reliable forward on the Canucks. 

Now, Sundin is a good center for the Maple Leafs.  But this guy has never won anything in the Stanley Cup playoffs, in fact, since he came to Toronto, the Buds haven’t made it to the Stanley Cup finals.  He won gold with Sweden at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, but no team in the NHL could be as good as Team Sweden was.  That team could’ve run the show on the Anaheim Ducks from last year with the talent they had.  The Canucks, or any other team in the NHL, isn’t Team Sweden from 2006, so we can throw out the Olympics.  The Olympics aren’t the NHL, and you don’t need a maximum of 16 wins in a maximum 28 games to win in the Olympics, you need three wins in a maximum of eight games.

These big deals aren’t always the answer.

If the two big trades of last year (Peter Forsberg to Nashville and Keith Tkachuk to Atlanta, both for role players and draft picks) taught us anything, it is that the big, sexy trade isn’t all it is cracked up to be.  Nashville went out in six games, Atlanta in four.  Gamble the future away for a first-round exit.  Yep.

The future for the Canucks is now.  You can’t disagree with that.  But to throw away three good, young players for a 36-year-old unrestricted free agent who may not resign here in the summer … come on people, get with it.  There is no guarantee that Sundin would be able to make a difference for the Canucks, and if he is traded here, there is nothing that says he will come back or not.  And if he doesn’t come back?  Well, then you’ve lost a second-line center, two prospects and a first-round pick and all for nothing.

You may as well go to the casino and throw down roughly $2 million on the number 13 at the roulette table.  Good luck!

Trade Talk Getting Ridiculous

Well, the NHL All-Star weekend has come and gone and now it is onto the stretch drive in the NHL regular season. 

With the stretch drive comes an all-too-familiar brand of talk: trade rumours.  Listening to the local sport talk shows on the Team 1040, all you hear now is “will the Canucks make a big deal?” “the Canucks’ time is now, so why not take a chance and land a big name?“

Canucks’ general manager Dave Nonis, maybe one of the more underrated GM’s in the NHL right now, has done his best to put to rest all the ridiculous and meticulous chatter of possible trades and all the other garbage dealing with trading players in the NHL.

Nonis, who was on the TEAM 1040 morning show with Barry MacDonald and Scott Rintoul, flat out said he was getting fed up with the talk trades.  He made a good point.  Actually two good points.  One was that you cannot force a trade to happen.  If a trade is there that fits what the Canucks actually need, which is to say that maybe the bigger names like Marian Hossa, Mats Sundin or Rob Blake may not be the best fit in Vancouver, then Nonis will go out and deliver a trade so long as it fits what he feels his club needs.

The second point is this.  Why sell out your team’s future for a big-name-rent-a-player?  Look at what happened last year with the Atlanta Thrashers and the Nashville Predators.

The Thrashers traded a roster player (Glen Metropolit), a first and third-round pick in the 2007 NHL entry draft and a second-round pick in this year’s entry draft for Keith Tkachuk in a bid to make a run at the Stanley Cup.  The Thrashers did win the Southeast Division, but were swept by the New York Rangers in the first-round of the playoffs. 

Wow.  Throwing away the foundations of a franchise for a rent-a-player and a quick first-round playoff exit.  Yep, seems worth it.

The Nashville Predators went out and landed Peter Forsberg from the Philadelphia Flyers for defenseman Ryan Parent, Scottie Upshall, a first-round and third-round draft pick in last year’s NHL draft.  Nashville was knocked out of the playoffs in the opening round to the San Jose Sharks in six games. 

The point of knocking the trades of the Thrashers and Predators is to illustrate that selling parts of the future of your organization for a player won’t necessarily help your hockey club make it to the finals, or anywhere in the playoffs for that matter.

Nonis knows this.  Does the Canucks general manager have assets to trade?  You bet he does, but he won’t play that card.  Sami Salo and Matthias Ohlund probably won’t be Canucks for more than a few more seasons, so when they go down, who’s going to fill their shoes?  Luc Bourdon and Alex Edler, who may be the best Canucks young defenseman as of right now.  Why trade a prospect for a player who may not even help your team win? 

The bottom line is this:  You can talk about trades all you want, you can say ‘hey go for the gusto and pick up a big name and let’s take a legitimate shot at winning the Stanley Cup’, but that doesn’t mean that everything will work out on the ice the way it should on paper.

Look at last year’s examples of major trades that went absolutely no where but to the golf course.

Why Forsberg Does Not Belong in Vancouver

By no means is this post meant to put anyone’s opinion down or belittle anyone that writes or leaves comments on this site.  It is simply a look into why Peter Forsberg does not belong in Vancouver.

It’s simple.  My colleague Hosea said it best in his last post when he referred to Forsberg as injury-prone.  I honestly cannot remember back to a season in the last five years where the gritty, yet skilled, Swede has not spent some amount of fairly lengthy time on the injury-reserve list.

It is unrealistic to believe that a player that would play the regular season at maybe 75 per cent health and then magically help carry a team to the Stanley Cup finals at roughly 75 to 70 per cent.  Keep in mind that over the course of a seven-game series and as you go further into the playoffs, there are few on a team who don’t have some kind of injury.

Now, there are some that would argue that, yes, Forsberg could get the job done based upon what Steve Yzerman did in the 2002 playoffs that saw the Red Wings captain help lift his team to a Stanley Cup.  Yzerman’s performance that year was remarkable, as he played through the entire playoffs with one healthy leg and was a major contributor in all facets of the game in the Wings championship run.

Valid point.  However, one could argue that Yzerman had the help of the following: Sergei Federov, Brendan Shanahan, Brett Hull, Nicklas Lidstrom, Chris Chelios, Henrik Zetterberg, Pavel Datsyuk, Luc Robitaille, Tomas Holmstrom, Igor Larionov, Dominek Hasek and Dan Cloutier.  Okay, maybe that last one was a bit unfair … still bitter. 

Sorry to say, but that 2002 Stanley Cup team had four solid lines that could score basically whenever they wanted to.

Would Forsberg help?  Maybe for a few games, but based upon the last few years that have seen Forsberg in and out of the lineup with nagging injury after nagging injury, he just isn’t worth the risk.

There is always a risk in trades or signing free agents because the game of hockey is a risky game.  It is fast, it is physical and it can take its toll on the body of a player who goes into the playoffs at 100 per cent health.  Forsberg, with an ankle injury that keeps experiencing set backs, is not at 100 per cent, not even close.

Forsberg, because he is too much of a risk due to injury, is not a good fit for the Vancouver Canucks.  I await your criticism.

TSC Top 10 Biggest Canadian Moments in the WJHC

To show we, at TSC, have no life, here are our choices for the top Canadian moments at the World Juniors:

 1987: Canada and Russia were involved in a bench-clearing brawl at the 1987 World Junior Hockey Championships in what became known as the “Punch-up in Piestany”.  With game officials not knowing how to diffuse the mess on the ice, the arena lights were shut off in an attempt to regain control.  That failed, and when the final punch had been landed, both teams were disqualified from the competition.

1993: Canada takes home the gold medal in Gavle, Sweden after finishing 6th the following year.  Canada, led by Martin Lapointe, beat Russia 9-2 and then defeated a Swedish team comprised of Peter Forsberg and Markus Naslund by a score of 3-2 to clinch the gold.

1995: Canada wins its third consecutive gold medal in Red Deer, Alberta, finishing the tournament 7-0-0.  Due to the NHL lockout that year, Canada featured a lot of destructive talent and scored 49 goals in seven games.

2006: After sending Kyle Chipchura in all alone to score an empty-net game-winning goal against the U.S. in 2006, Steve Downie is elbowed by Jack Johnson in the head.  Downie remained in the tournament and Johnson became public enemy No. 1 in Canada that year, as well as the next.

2003: In one of the most exciting games in World Junior Hockey history, Jeff Woywitka scores to give Canada a one-goal lead against the Americans.  The goal erupted the crowds in Halifax, which could be heard in Vancouver, while TSN’s Gord Miller gave one of the most neck hair-raising calls on the goal of all time.

1999: Roberto Luongo stole the show in Winnipeg for Team Canada in a 3-2 loss to the Russians in overtime of the gold medal game.  Luongo faced 40 shots and was the only reason that game remained close.  Simon Gagne had a breakthrough tournament as well, scoring seven goals and tallying eight points in seven games.

2004: Rostislav Olezs is the recipient of a massive Dion Phaneuf hit that kept the Czech forward down for several minutes at the 2004 World Junior Hockey Championship in Helsinki, Finland.  The term “That’s a Dion!” was coined the day by TSN hockey analyst Pierre McGuire.

2005: The following year, Pierre McGuire came up with a new term to show his enthusiasm for Dion Phaneuf.  “Bam! Bam! That’s a double-Dion!” was used to describe two hits that Phanuef threw within the span of less than two seconds.  The turnover led to a Team Canada goal and more importantly, its first gold medal in the WJHC since 1997. 

2006: Again with Brent Sutter behind the bench in Vancouver, Team Canada goes undefeated at the 2006 WJHC and captures back-to-back gold medals.  Steve Downie emerged as one of Canada’s best players, scoring the winning goal of the gold medal game against Russia, while Justin Pogge captured his third shutout of the tournament.

2007: Canada and the U.S.A. lock horns in another epic battle between the two powerhouse teams in the semi final in Leksland, Sweden.  Tied through 60 minutes of regulation and 10 minutes of overtime at 1-1, Canada and the U.S.A. went seven rounds in the shootout before Carey Price stopped Peter Mueller to give Canada the win and a shot at a third straight gold medal.  Jonathan Toews scored three times in the shootout, including the game winner.  Canada went on to defeat the Russians in the gold medal game by a score of 4-2.