After yesterday's 2-1 loss to the Edmonton Oilers, the local hockey concern, the Vancouver Canucks, were disqualified from the 2008 Stanley Cup Playoffs. For those of you who who regard this turn of events as tragic, this page invites you to consider that things could be worse.
This page realizes that missing the playoffs means that the Canucks are now 0 for 38 seasons in securing an National Hockey League Championship, but here's something else Canucks fans have never experienced: the threat of their favourite team moving or an owner brave/foolish enough to follow through with that threat. This is something that fans of each of the Canucks' Northwest Division rivals know something about: Minnesota lost the North Stars to Dallas before the expansion Wild arrived in St. Paul. The Quebec Nordiques bolted to Denver in 1995 to win the Stanley Cup as the Colorado Avalanche the following year. The owners of both the Calgary Flames and Edmonton Oilers both threatened their respective City Halls with relocation, and successfully siphoned Federal infrastructure grants that were intended for municipal projects not involving millionaires on skates.
Canucks fans could also look about 200 miles south to Seattle, where both MLB's Seattle Mariners and the NFL's Seahawks threatened to disembark for Tampa Bay and Los Angeles respectively unless new sporting palaces were plastered with public money, while public schools, transit, and other critical infrastructure went wanting . Seattle's other major pro team, the NBA's Supersonics, are packing their bags for Oklahoma City after new owner Clay Bennett was unsuccessful in holding the Washington State Legislature for a $500 million ransom in order to build a new arena in suburban of Renton. Bennett's group bought the Sonics from Starbucks' executive Howard Schultz and claimed they didn't want to move the team to his hometown (Oklahoma City), but for some reason they can live with only $120 million in OKC tax dollars to simply renovate the Ford Center. The final Sonics home games at the allegedly inadequate Key Arena have been marked by protests and an abundance of security guards. Sorry Canucks fans, Sonics fans have you sorely beaten when it comes to season-ending bitterness.
If there are any Canucks fans who left GM Place last night wondering 'what might have been', this page hopes that they took a good, hard look at the dishevelled, desperate street people begging by the arena exits, just like every other major league stadium and arena in North America, and felt a sense of relief it wasn't them. Perhaps they could take that sense of relief, add it to the money they would have otherwise spent on playoff tickets, and put it towards doing something constructive for those who need it more than the Acquilini family or Molson Breweries.
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