Captain Vancouver — Page 3

Going into the 1988 draft, with a franchise record of 435 wins and 650 regular season losses over 18 seasons, the Canucks hoped that their most persistent quality—failure—would finally catapult them toward success. The worst teams from the previous season get to pick first; that year, the Canucks drafted second. After Minnesota (now Dallas) took Mike Modano, the Canucks chose Linden, who was happy to land here. “I always had that sense, I guess from my dad, that Western Canada stuck together,” he says. “So I think that was a right fit for me, staying in the west, and having an opportunity to play in Canada.”The Canucks, too, were delighted. “He’s shown a lot of leadership skills early in life and usually those patterns don’t change,” general manager Pat Quinn said at the time, proving himself a prophet. “From what we hear he’s a coach’s dream—a player you can put out on the ice in almost every situation.”

The coach’s ultimate dream, of course, is the Stanley Cup. The Canucks had made an appearance in the 1982 Cup Final, but “next year” had been the hope and the reality for Vancouver fans ever since 1915, when the Vancouver Millionaires, led by the great Cyclone Taylor, won the city’s only Stanley Cup.

There was a lot of pressure on the teenaged Linden to lead his team out of the wilderness, but he “felt completely prepared to be a National Hockey Leaguer,” he recalls. He was less prepared for the post-Expo 86 boomtown that was Vancouver. “When I was a kid we used to go to Calgary and look at tall buildings. So for me it was a big change. I remember thinking the craziest thing was having to pay all this money for parking. We didn’t have pay parking in Medicine Hat.”

Linden scored his first hat trick a month into his rookie season. Even so, he smashed his stick in the dressing room after the Canucks found a way to lose 7-6 to Minnesota. “This kid has a burning desire to win,” Pat Quinn told a Minnesota reporter at the time. “I think he finds it hard how some of our veterans can have a ‘Well, we worked hard but lost again’ attitude. He can’t accept that.”

Finally, a player who felt about the game the way long-suffering fans did. He scored another hat trick a week later, tied for the lead in team goals that year with 30, and became the first Canuck rookie to win team MVP honours. He finished second to Brian Leetch in Calder Trophy-voting as rookie of the year. “And two years later,” he says, “I was a captain in the National Hockey League.”

At 21, he was the NHL’s youngest captain, but the “C” and the responsibilities that went with it were, to him, as they should be. Off the ice, he hired an accountant and financial advisor to look after his money (now easily in the double-digit millions—in addition to the $6.3 million extension, another of his Canuck deals was worth $7.2 million). “The people I selected at that time,” he says, “are the same ones I use today.”

On the ice, he led the Canucks to a first-place finish in the Smythe Division in 1992—a feat that hadn’t happened since 1975. The following season the Canucks blew the roof off with a franchise-record 101 points. And then came that magical run in the 1994 playoffs, one that revealed the intensity of Linden’s will. With his black eye, broken nose and focussed determination, it was as if he could see his name etched on the Stanley Cup and it was fuelling his every shift to Game 7 at Madison Square Garden. “I was sitting there in amazement that we were one game away, and that I could be carrying the Stanley Cup around Madison Square Garden,” he recalls. “It was a pretty surreal experience. That afternoon before the game was pretty long.”

Phil Pritchard, famous for his MasterCard commercial as “Keeper of the Stanley Cup,” was sure the Canucks were going to win it all. In Game 5, with the Rangers up three games to one, and scalpers selling rinkside seats at $5,000 (U.S.), Pritchard had been ready to hand the jug to the Rangers to end their 54-year curse. The Stanley Cup is perhaps the most superstition-bound trophy in sports, and you do not even touch it if you haven’t won it. The Rangers had suffered the Curse in 1940, when the team president burned the paid-up mortgage to Madison Square Garden in the Cup’s bowl, and the hockey gods, offended at this profaning of the chalice, had deprived the Rangers of it ever since.

Before Game 5 in the ’94 final, a Ranger official had brought friends and family to see the Cup, and Pritchard had to polish the thing again to rid it of paw prints, all the while thinking that the Rangers had cursed themselves again. Early in the third period, the Canucks were up 3-0 and Pritchard, not understanding (as Canuck fans do in their DNA) that no Canuck lead is ever safe, thought Stanley would not be won tonight.

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