Before the season started, I expected the Flames to take the Northwest division because of Vancouver’s absurd 14-game road streak (lets not even linger upon how wrong I was about Colorado). Even though the giant trip was broken up by the Olympic break, my guess was that would be little solace to Olympians like Roberto Luongo, the Sedin twins and Ryan Kesler.
Clearly, I was dead wrong. The Canucks managed an impressive 8-5-1 record during the road trip and remain atop the Northwest. NHL.com has some really fantastic stuff on the Canucks’ epic road swing. I’ll pick out some of my favorite excerpts to save your delicate, perhaps Constanza-sque hands the beating of all that clicking and scrolling.
BEST CANUCKS SUPPORT
Tanner Glass -- “Phoenix is incredible. We would score and it felt like we were at a home game, it was awesome. Lots of kids asking for autographs standing outside in the sun there, it’s nice, people get down there for a vacation and they take in a Canucks game.”
BEST SLEEP
Darcy Hordichuk -- “I’m fortunate enough to be a pretty good sleeper, but in Colorado it was the best. You open the windows and get some of that fresh air and you get a view of the mountains and it’s just such peaceful scenery. That’s a city anyone can have a good night’s sleep in.”
...
BEST MEMORY
Tanner Glass -- “It was long, there was a lot of plane rides, a lot of busing and a lot of wake-up calls. That’s probably going to be my biggest memory actually, waking up to Hordi’s chanting every morning, that will stick with me for a while, as much as I’d like to get rid of it. I don’t even know what he is chanting, I don’t think it’s in English, he just wakes up and opens the blinds and lets the sunlight come in and then he yells something in Yiddish or something. That’s my memory.”
Finally, here are some of my favorite factoids from Derek Jory’s “by the numbers” take on the Canucks’ road trip. Again, great job by NHL.com to go beyond the obvious and come up with some really colorful takes on this unusual situation.
- 42 - Days away from General Motors Place
- 13 - North American cities visited (Columbus twice)
- 3 - Time zones visited (9 East, 3 Central, 2 Mountain)
- -15.8 - Coldest city (in degrees Celsius) visited (Ottawa)
- +15.5 - Warmest city (in degrees Celsius) visited (Phoenix)
- 20,737 - Total kilometers traveled (11,608 first half, 9,129 second half)
- 30 hours, 17 minutes - Total flight time (16:35 first half, 13:42 second half)
- 7 - Times Darcy Hordichuk sang, “This is the trip that never ends, it just goes on and on my friends...”
- 28 - Points up for grabs
- 17 - Points earned
- 6 - Comeback wins
- 22,235 - Highest attendance (Chicago)
- 12,861 - Lowest attendance (Colorado)
- 0 - Times Daniel Sedin pretended to be twin brother Henrik or vice versa
- 2,520 - Facebook status updates, in millions, by users since the Canucks left
(H/T to Alix Wright from Canucks Hockey Blog)