Theo Fleury shitstorm: Vancouver will lose first round

Theo Fleury: great hockey player, bad gambler. His latest appearance on team 1040 (Sports radio in Vancouver) was just another bad gamble waiting to get cashed out.

Fleury stated that the Vancouver Canucks, while putting up top numbers in almost every stat regular season wise, will fall out of the playoffs in the first round,  non dependent on who their opponent may be.

To be more precise, Fleury pin pointed the problem to arguably the hottest player in the NHL for his respective position: Robert Luongo. Fleury believes that Luongo will always be a regular season fantasy leader, but a ghost when the playoffs are around.

"Who cares?" Luongo responded when being asked for his opinion on Fleury's comments.

Ever since Fleury voiced his opinion on radio, he has been taking heat from Vancouver fans over facebook and twitter. While voices of complaint should have been expected, some fans are taking it too far. One spineless fan went even far enough to attack Fleury's sexual orientation. Fleury did not respond kindly to this. In one of his tweets, he says that the Vancouver fans are finally showing their true "color".

Woah there Theo, hold on a second.

Are you really going to label all Canucks fans as classless trash just based on your experience with one ignorant moron over twitter?

And do you think this happened only because it was Vancouver? Would this have not happened if you did what you did in any other NHL town besides Calgary?

You may have half the country pitying you for what you had gone through during your career, but this is just pathetic. To make a blunt comment like that over the radio and then go on criticize all fans of a Canadian hockey market, really?

Enough is enough. This isn't how you're promote a book.

Long term deals, good or bad?

In the post lock out era of the NHL, long term deals has been all the rage. From the team and the GM's perspective, locking up a star player for years to come seem to be a smart investment, but is it really?

Looking at the most recent long term deal, Ilya Kovalchuk is currently at 12 goals, 13 assists for a total of 25 points on the season, not to mention a league worst plus minus of -27. He is on pace for a career worst season in every single category possible. He was awarded with a 17 year, $102 million dollar deal just last summer, and has done nothing to live up to it. With the way this is going, not only is New Jersey dead last in the NHL(yes, even the Oilers have more points), but they also seem to have a not so bright future ahead of them. 

It's only normal for the Jersey fans to ask themselves: "Where do we go from here?" If Kovalchuk continues to perform this way, the only sensible move is to get him out of there. But with a deal like that attached to a player, Lou Lamoriello has better got some good strings to pull. At the end of the day, it's more than likely that Lamoriello's only option is to do something along the lines of what Washington did with Jaromir Jagr years back. 

After acquiring Kovalchuk, the Devils went to drop out in the first round of the playoffs against the Flyers in 5 games. Losing in itself wasn't all that bad, the Flyers had a great line up and momentum coming into the playoffs. Instead, what stood out for me was that Kovalchuk was a one man army on the ice, fighting a lost cause. Kovalchuk has been doing that his entire career with Atlanta, it's no wonder that the Thrashers has only made the playoffs once during his stay there. 

As demonstrated, Kovalchuk was not the missing piece that they were looking for. Why would you bother resigning a player that had limited success in your lineup? This is no where as strange as the Olli Jokinen signing done by Calgary. Still, it is strange reasoning nonetheless. 

This just goes to show, contrary to popular belief; GMs do not place the team before themselves. Before anything else, the top priority for any staff is to keep their job. Sometimes it has a mutualistic relationship with the success of the team, but other times it may not. In my mind, a vital factor that played a role in the signing of Kovalchuk was that the Devils did not want to make their trade with Atlanta go down the drain. Like any good poker player, they should have known when to stand up and walk away. But they chose not to: they gambled and lost. 

Just like how respect must be earned, so do contracts. Signing players to huge multi year deals just because they've been putting up star player numbers is one of the biggest mistakes a GM can possibly make. There are certainly some players that deserve life time contracts, but sadly Kovalchuk is not one of them. 

Agree or disagree? Let me know what you think.