I only met Brian Burke once in my life and the former Canucks GM never gave me any brilliant one-liners, but during his second tour of duty in Vancouver he was known to drop a number of golden nuggets.
He offered to drive players who made, in his opinion, unreasonable demands to the airport.
When the Sedin twins were getting pushed around he said, “I didn’t know Sedin was Swedish for punch me.”
But my personal favorite is when he called Vancouver a goalie graveyard.
Since Kirk McLean stood between the pipes for the Canucks a number of goalies came in, all of them achieving very limited success.
Sean Burke, Arturs Irbe, Garth Snow, Kevin Weekes, Dan Cloutier and Alex Auld are just some of the names that have been shuttled in and out of the goal crease and there was only one playoff series win amongst the lot of them.
The curse of the goalie was seemingly broken when Roberto Luongo rode into town last season.
He was nominated for the Vezina, Hart and Pearson trophies; broke McLean’s single season wins record and tied a league record for wins in a single season (it was broken by Martin Brodeur in the same season).
Although he is, in my opinion, the best goalie we’ve ever had, he has gotten off to slow starts in each of his two seasons in Vancouver.
So far this year, Luongo ranks in the bottom half of the NHL in terms of GAA and Save Percentage and fans are expressing concern.
Is it the return of the goalie graveyard? We only have 70 more games to find out.
Photo by Flickr user itsthedavidshow.
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