Dear Vancouver Canucks

Dear Vancouver Canucks,

When you hear your fans bitching and moaning and the media crucifying you I want you to understand why. We’re confused. We don’t understand this at all. It's making us sad, scared and depressed.

What pisses me off and makes me feel sick to my stomach is that you, Vancouver, don’t just lose a playoff game, you completely and utterly meltdown. You implode. You disintergrate.

If these losses were 3-2 or 5-4 I wouldn’t be this panicked or this upset. A 7-2 loss and a 5-0 loss are worse than the collapses the Rangers and the Kings have suffered so far this round – where they give up 3 or 4 goal leads. The reason? At least the Rangers and Kings showed up. You, my dear sweet Canucks, may as well not have left the dressing room for game 4 and 5 against Chicago.

I don’t coach hockey – never have. I don’t even play hockey – never have. Hell I don’t even sleep with hockey players (shocking, I know) so I admit I have absolutely no insight on how this type of all-encompassing breakdown in mental and physical play can happen to a team that won EVERYTHING and NEVER gave up on ANYTHING for 6 months.

(If anyone has a logical explanation for why this happens to the canucks, please – I am begging you – enlighten me.)

I don’t want to pick on Kesler or Burrows who are yet to produce this series. I don’t want to pick on the Sedins who have been better than last year but that just means they’ve been sporadic instead of non-existent. And I don’t even want to pick on the defense – mostly because I was taught not to talk ill of the dead. And I definitely do NOT want to pick on Luongo. I just don’t. It's not about one performance - you're a team - and you need to start playing like one again. So if Kes doesn't score, Hansen does. If the Sedins don't check, Oreskovich does. If Burrows misses a shot, Edler nails the rebound. You remember those days don't you? We do, because it was just last week!

But I will say this to you my Canucks....

After getting blown right out of Game 4 you all went to the media and said the fans were panicking needlessly. That the world was not ending. You didn’t expect to win the cup 16-0. That fans and media were being irrational. The loss was "not a big deal"

You made me feel bad for doubting you, despite your history. So I bit my lip and believed in you. Trusted you. I was confident and excited at puck drop for Game 5.

So now YOU NEED TO LISTEN TO ME CANUCKS: getting blown out of Game 5 - AKA not showing up for 2 games in a row - THAT is a BIG DEAL.

You need to wake the hell up and figure out where your regular season mojo went and get it back – NOW. No more of this crap. The Hawks are not better than you. They’re just trying harder. They aren't winning the games - YOU are losing them! That means you have no one to blame but yourself. So FIX IT.

I believe you can win this series. But I also believe that if you fall apart like this in Round 2 or Round 3 or (please Hockey Gods) the Stanley Cup Final – you won’t get a chance to bounce back.

So figure it out now, kick the Hawks asses, and don’t do it again. Okay? Okay.

Thanking you in advance,

Me.