Canucks Nation

[Cross-posted from Urban Vancouver.]

Tonight the Canucks play the hated Dallas Stars in Game 6, and I'm going to be part of the group at the Canucks Outsider featuring my ill-informed punditry. Watch it live at http://ustream.tv/canucksoutsider and watch as I startle strangers by yelling loudly when the home team scores. Dave will no doubt bring up Hockey Night in Iceland, and it's my understanding that he doesn't know about the surprise I have for him, the story about which I was holding on to as fodder for the podcast he's long threatened to do with me.

Predictions for the game? I'm still going with Jeff Cowan scoring the winner (I always stick to my predictions, no matter how wrong), but offer no guess as to the final score.

[Cross-posted from Urban Vancouver.]

Everybody I talked to thinks the Canucks are going close out the series against the Dallas Stars tonight, but nobody thinks they're going to win by as much as I think they are, 4 goals to 1. (The consensus is 2-1, maybe 3-1 with an empty-netter.) Also I'm going with Cowan for the game-winner, despite my two wrong predictions that he would score the overtime winner in Games 1 and 3.

[Cross-posted from Urban Vancouver.]

The Malahoff Sanderband wrote in last week to ask us if we could point to their new jam, "The Luongo Song", an MP3 of which you can purchase through their website. Gotta love a song that starts of with "bingo bongo". It woke me up as I currently have TEAM 1040 as the station my alarm clock is set to, and I had to chuckle.

[Cross-posted from Urban Vancouver.]

Game 2 wasn't a lot of fun from a Vancouver Canucks fan's perspective: seeing Turco shut us out and the opposing team dominate the home team so thoroughly for at least 2 periods was frustrating to watch. Same goes for Game 3 in Dallas: I fully expected the Stars to shut the Canucks down after they scored on the power play, but at least they pulled it out with a Jan Bulis garbage goal and Taylor Pyatt's easy one. (Turco should have had it, but I'll take it.) In both overtime games I chose Jeff Cowan to win it, and was wrong both times.

This must have been the first game played in Dallas where I heard the national anthem sung: as the Canucks LJ community notes, the fans scream out "Stars!" any time the word appears in "The Star Spangled Banner". A quick search finds an article about singing the national anthem with what to expect at some stadiums. (Also, it did not originate in Minnesota like I first wondered.) In Baltimore, apparently, before an Orioles baseball game, the fans scream out "Oh!" at the appropriate places. Cheesy? Not any more cheesy than the Canucks fans singing when Mark Donnelly holds the microphone out. Disrespectful? Maybe, but it's not really my call, since it's not the national anthem for the country which I call myself a citizen of. If fans screamed "SUCKS!" after "Canada" during our national anthem, I'd find that disrespectful. But calling out the team name if it appears in it? Sounds like fun to me.

[Cross posted from Urban Vancouver.]

Just a few seconds before Game 2 between the Dallas Stars and the Vancouver Canucks, and during the game on Wednesday, I tried a little experiment. As much as I like Jim Hughson's competent play-by-play, it's a lot more fun to get swept up by John Shorthouse and Tom Larscheid. More so than Hughson, Shorty and Larscheid are homers, in that they're fans who have an obvious bias towards the Canucks. You can hear it best after the Canucks score, with Larscheid exclaiming, especially when it's a tie-breaking goal. So on Wednesday I tried watching the game with the volume down and TEAM 1040 turned up, but couldn't go through with it, because the radio was a split second ahead of the play as seen on TV. I didn't want to find out from Shorty that the home team scored before it "actually" happened on my screen. I'm going to try listening on the web: maybe there will be enough of a lag that the online stream will line up with what I see.

So which do you prefer? Jim Hughson or John Shorthouse? The correct answer is usually "what I grew up with", and in my case it's Jim Robson, especially when games were "simulcast" on CKNW and BCTV.

[Cross-posted from Urban Vancouver]

Like many last night, I endured the over 5 hours of Canucks hockey, and was truly entertained by the first period before the two teams settled down into their "system". It doesn't seem to be listed in box scores, but the Canucks dominated on faceoffs. It wasn't even close. That said, the Stars dominated on shots, with Luongo providing yet another ridiculous save, this time off his forehead. I didn't even notice the Sedins until the second overtime, and even though they combined on the winning goal in 4OT, I got the sense that the Stars were letting them cycle but predicting where they would end up and breaking it. Naslund had at least two hits, a defensive play, and a goal (that shouldn't have counted). 4 overtimes was a little ridiculous, and the end of the game coming at 12:35 prevented most people from driving around hocking and celebrating.

Out of the marathon came what the CBC is trying to make a new hockey tradition in addition to Towel Power and the playoffs beard: the playoff beeramid. I took a crappy cellphone picture of my TV when Kelly Hrudey was counting how many beer cups someone (or more likely a group of someones) used to create the beeramid. But how are we going to celebrate the tradition? A beeramid t-shirt? A flag with the correct amount of beer cups? A package of cellophane-wrapped cups with instructions on creating the proper hockey beeramid?

The NHL playoffs are back in Vancouver after a three-year hiatus (including the lockout), and longer if you consider getting knocked out in the first round of 2004. I've got playoff fever, though only a case strong enough to put a Canucks sticker on my iPod and wave a flag on Hastings Street after the Canucks win. I'm no good with predicting anything, and plus it's better to put your money where your mouth is with a bet or, if you're really serious, a prediction market. But here goes anyway: I'm predicting that the Canucks will make it into the second round. After that, I have no idea: they are going to have a tough time with Anaheim or San Jose, or even Calgary, my second choice for Stanley Cup champion. The consensus seems to be Canucks in 6 games (though The Dallas Morning News blogger Mike Heika is predicting Vancouver in 7), but I'm going out on a limb and saying they'll win it at home in 5.

You don't have to login to comment on Urban Vancouver anymore, so let's have your prediction! Either a link to your blog or your prediction below will do. Any unusual bets being made? Head over to Urban Vancouver and post your predictions there!

Darren did a little digging into why the widescreen broadcast of the Canucks vs. Avalanche game last weekend had the edges cut off for regular TV viewers. Darren posted the full email reply from 'a senior television executive' to the Canucks Central forums. There's some good info there, like why the CBC doesn't broadcast both games on Saturday nights in HD, and what went wrong during the broadcast of the game in Colorado:

We generally shoot the second game with an SD digital mobile. That's because today, we have only one HD mobile, and rentals are extremely expensive. These mobiles produce a high quality digital standard definition signal. It is widescreen. This was the circumstance in the November 4th Vancouver at Colorado game. So while it is widescreen, it is not HD. That widescreen SD signal is sent back to the network centre via digital link, and upconverted for HD and edge cropped for SD. Again, it is critical that we protect safe area 4x3 in our shooting, and it was here we failed that Saturday night.Response from the CBC on Last Saturday Night's Game, We couldn't see the corners or the second point man on the PP

Watching a not very exciting game between the Colorado Avalanche on Hockey Night in Canada, I noticed that often the puck would not be shown on on or the other side of the screen. Looking around for whether the game was broadcast in HDTV—and not really knowing the difference from HDTV to regular TV, never having experienced the former—I wondered if that's what the game was broadcast in. The link will die so I've attached the schedule here, but apparently the game was broadcast not in HDTV but widescreen. It seems as if the camera operator for the above ice view angled such that the puck, if in one end of the rink, would be on the very edge of the widescreen to show the rest of the offensive zone. This seemed to have the effect of cutting plays for regular-width TV viewers like myself.

Time passes and I run into Darren Barefoot at a book-launching event, and he tells me that he posted to the Canucks Central forum about this. Others experienced it too, but I'm not so sure it was HDTV. Just widescreen, and those who had TVs without widescreen got the shot cropped.