Canucks and Beyond

Canucks Fans are Certifiable

04/23/2008 at 6:38pm EDT

In ESPN The Magazine they’ve taken 122 sports franchises (MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL) and had 80,000 fans rank their favorite team by a variety of measures. (Check out all the rankings, or your own favorite team, here).

Looking at Vancouver, fans’ dissatisfaction is seen in ranking their team at 91st place—meaning fans of 90 other teams were happier with their organization than Canuck fans are. (Of all the Canadian teams, only Toronto fans were more disgusted with their club, ranking at 121st place).

Which prompted this quick assessment from ESPN’s Brian Kamenetzky:

[Fans] have packed GM Place to 101.1% capacity this season despite shelling out $95.86 in per-game costs, highest in the NHL and nearly 40% above the league average. For those prices, fans are certifiable if they don’t complain about a team that hasn’t made it past the second round since a Finals run in 1994 and has replaced a group of high-fliers with low-scoring plodders.

Oh, we complain rather a lot—and yet we still fork out the bucks.

The things Vancouver fans were most happy with were coaching and leadership, and they were least happy with the stadium experience at GM Place. Neither of which makes much sense given that we just canned the GM (i.e. leadership) which seemed to make a ton of fans happy; and GM Place as an arena is pretty damn nice, I’ve always thought.

Furthermore, this year’s ranking is actually an improvement over last year at 99th place.

So apparently, winning the NW Division and making it to the 2nd round of the playoffs wasn’t nearly as rewarding an experience for Canucks fans as missing the playoffs entirely and looking like a performance of Dead Fish On Ice for large stretches of the season.

As such, I suppose “certifiable” is a pretty good word for Canucks fans.

Case closed.

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