Canucks: 10 year anniversary of 2011 Stanley Cup Final
By Joshua Rey
In the middle of June 2011, Adele’s Rolling in the Deep was at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, Super 8 was the highest grossing movie at the box office and, more importantly, the Vancouver Canucks were hoping to win their first Stanley Cup in franchise history after 40 years of hurt.
Unfortunately, as we all know, the team ended up being a win short. In fact, the Canucks are the only team in NHL history to lose game seven of the Stanley Cup Final twice. The first being in New York, losing 3-2 to the Rangers in 1994, and the second losing 4-0 on home ice to the Boston Bruins. (Fans caused destruction in the downtown core both times, but let’s not get into that).
The 2011 Canucks team was favoured to win the cup even before the 2010-11 season started. That team scored plenty of goals, had great special teams, good goaltending and solid depth. Why couldn’t they win it all? How did it all fall apart? To answer these questions, we need to go back a little.
How was the team put together?
In the summer of 2010, GM-at-the-time Mike Gillis had work to do after his team suffered two straight second round exits to the Chicago Blackhawks, with the latter playoffs leading to a Stanley Cup win for Chicago. Gillis had most of his key players locked up, including Henrik and Daniel Sedin, Alex Burrows, Alex Edler, Ryan Kesler and Roberto Luongo, but the team still needed a few more pieces to move past their playoff woes.
The first need was help on the blue line. On June 25th, 2010, the team addressed that need, trading away their 2010 first round pick, as well as Steve Bernier and Michael Grabner, to the Florida Panthers in exchange for Keith Ballard and Victor Oreskovich.
The Canucks also took care of things in free agency, signing Dan Hamhuis to a six-year contract, Manny Malhotra to a three-year contract and Raffi Torres to a one-year contract.
At the trade deadline, Maxim Lapierre and Chris Higgins were acquired for cheap. After the deadline, the Canucks were just $1000 below the cap, which was $59.4 million at the time, due to injury. Had everyone been healthy entering the postseason, the team’s cap hit would have been at $67 million. Kudos to assistant general manager Laurence Gilman and the rest of the management for working out the cap in the Canucks favour.
After years in the AHL, Cory Schneider made his mark in the big league, serving as the backup for Luongo. The duo would go on to win the William M. Jennings Trophy, an award giving to the goalie(s) that allowed the fewest goals during the regular season.