Fan In Van

The Cup Finals Will Change Vancouver

The Vancouver Canucks are nowhere near an ice rink at this point and time. In fact, hockey is probably the last thing on a lot of players’ minds at this point. But whether they’re aware of it or not, the upcoming Stanley Cup final can ultimately decide what kind of moves will be made in the offseason

We might as well pencil it in, folks. In the end, we all know that one week from now it’ll be the Detroit Red Wings matching up against the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Stanley Cup finals of 2008. Unless God himself strikes down Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Marc-Andre Fleury, Pavel Datsyuk, Henrik Zetterberg, Nick Lidstrom and Chris Osgood all at once, it should be the Wings and Pens.

Let’s look back quickly at the last Stanley Cup final winner, the Anaheim Ducks. When Brian Burke’s California franchise steamrolled over the competition using brute force, fisticuffs and a good old fashioned strong defence, a lot of teams, Vancouver included, tried to build their teams around the same philosophy. You see, a lot of GMs these days live in a “Monkey-see-Monkey-do”-type of world; what worked in the Cup final one season will definitely work the next, right?

So the offseason came and went, and then-GM Dave Nonis never fully addressed the scoring situation, instead choosing to build his Canuck team a little more Duck-like, with more defence (Aaron Miller, Alex Edler) and more brutes (Byron Ritchie, Jeff Cowan). However, the Canucks failed to make the postseason and the Ducks got bounced in the first round.

Nonetheless, don’t think for a second that the Canucks won’t make the same mistake again. To repeat, GMs live in a Monkey-see-Monkey-do world, and Mike Gillis most certainly will build his team a little closer to that of this year’s Cup finalists, Pittsburgh and Detroit.

The question is, are the Canucks going to look like Pittsburgh or Detroit?

If the Penguins win the Cup, can we expect to see a younger, faster, more offensively oriented Canuck lineup? If that is the case we can expect to see some major overhaul in Canuck land. Not only that, but prospects, picks and young players around the entire NHL could see their values skyrocketing. Hypothetically, you can expect to see more Dipietro-like contracts given to young players.

But what about Detroit?

Now here lies my own dilemma. Let me describe Detroit in a specific way: European captain, scoring mostly carried by European forwards of Swedish descent and one Russian, a handful of plugs and defensive forwards with a fairly deep defensive core and solid goaltending.

Sounds familiar, right?

If Detroit wins the Stanley Cup, does that potentially signal the fact that Markus Naslund will return to Vancouver? Or does Pittsburgh’s capture of the trophy mean more veteran departures?

The fact remains that there are going to be a ton of general managers in the offseason attempting to replicate their teams into the same mold of the winning team of the Stanley Cup. It will always be this way. But in the end, with Pittsburgh and Detroit being two completely different teams, the Canuck roster come October may be based completely on what happens in the next two weeks.