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Canucks coverage drives readership and viewership and listenership. The better the team is doing, the more interest the team creates, and that’s best for business.
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Published Dec 01, 2025 • 5 minute read
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Michael Bublé on CHEK TV last week: “We’ve been beaten and so we just keep waiting for the next bad thing. And there’s a lot of guys … in the media that know that and they prey upon it and they love it. They want us to lose. It’s better for them.” Photo by Bruce Bennett /Getty ImagesArticle content
In this case, Michael Bublé is wrong.
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Love how he promotes this province. Love how passionate he is about the Vancouver Canucks, and what he does as a part owner of the Vancouver Giants. Love his dad, Lewis Bublé, who is around Giants games regularly and is as pleasant a person as you’ll ever meet.
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But this take of his that the media is rooting for the Canucks to lose? The Burnaby song man is out of tune on this one.
To recap, Bublé went on Donnie and Dhali: The Team on CHEK TV last week and was talking about the struggles of being a Canucks fan and said this: “We’ve been beaten and so we just keep waiting for the next bad thing. And there’s a lot of guys — and you know this — in the media that know that and they prey upon it and they love it. They want us to lose. It’s better for them. They don’t even know what they’re talking about and they just sell the garbage to us. And because we’ve been beaten, we just lap it all up, and then we get more angry, and they fuel the fire, and they’re laughing at us.”
Poppycock, Michael Bublé. Poppycock, sir.
Canucks coverage is what helps drives readership for this newspaper. It’s a driver for other media outlets as well. The better the hockey club is doing, the more people are interested and want to read about and listen to and watch Canucks.
It’s what’s best for business.
Plus, fewer reporters across the various outlets are travelling regularly for away games. It started during the COVID pandemic and has remained. A deep Canuck playoff run is going to further increase interest and is bound to lead to more reporters following along to whatever opposing city they are playing in. And that will be better for fans, too.
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There are media types who are hyper-critical of the Canucks. There are some who are just plain cranky people, no matter the topic. That’s all true. Also true is the fact that Canucks have just three playoff series wins — if you count the qualifying round from the COVID pandemic bubble playoffs — since the team went to the Stanley Cup Finals in 2011. As well, Vancouver is 30th in the NHL for this season as of Monday morning.
You report on those things. You analyze them. But it doesn’t mean you revel in that situation.
The vast majority of the media in town grew up in B.C. and know what winning a Stanley Cup here would mean.
Don Taylor, who hasn’t shied away from being critical of the team on Donnie and Dhali, told Postmedia in October 2023 in a story about him being inducted in the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame: “I want to see a Canucks Stanley Cup win before it’s over for me. That’s big. I honestly think I would cry so much that day that I wouldn’t be able to talk to anybody.
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“For me, it’s not just the National Hockey League Canucks,” continued Taylor, who is from Burnaby. “My first memory of hockey was seeing the Canucks play at the old PNE Forum in the 1960s, before the Pacific Coliseum was built and they were a farm team. The first player that I focused on was Tony Esposito, who was in the Montreal Canadiens organization then. I remember my dad telling me about how he was Phil Esposito’s little brother and how he was well on his way to the NHL himself. To go from there to seeing them win the Stanley Cup and, with all the pain and some glory that has come in between, would be so special to me. Of course it would.”
Rest assured, he is not alone in these jobs in this town in that type of thinking.
We reached out to Jannik Hansen about all this, too, since he has a unique perspective as a player with the team during that 2011 heyday period, and is currently an analyst with Sportsnet 650.
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Hansen has voiced concerns about the club’s direction during their struggles the past two seasons. He also maintains that Vancouver has a long-standing reputation for a critical media and that “when we were one of the best teams in the league, they would still look for the guy who hadn’t scored for a couple of games, or the guy whose plus-minus wasn’t good the night before, and especially the beat writers.”
“In San Jose, it was the complete opposite,” said Hansen, who played for a year and a half with the Sharks after spending his first 10 seasons with the Canucks.
He added: “Canadian hockey markets are way tougher than the U.S. The biggest thing (in the U.S.) is when you leave the rink, nobody knows you, so when things don’t go well you can leave it at the rink. In Canada, it follows you everywhere.”
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MEDIA THREE STARS
First star: Elliotte Friedman on his Canuck trade partner take on his 32 Thoughts podcast Monday.
Friedman suggests that the Philadelphia Flyers could be a team that Vancouver deals with, spearheaded by the connection with coach Rick Tocchet and his affinity for Vancouver players. “And we’re not even talking about (Quinn) Hughes — everyone likes Hughes, and I don’t think anything’s going on there right now,” Friedman says.
Second star: Dan Riccio on CanucksArmy talking his move to Toronto on Thursday.
The former Sportsnet 650 host, who is returning to his hometown roots for a new Nation Network show called Off The Roster, also spoke about what it took to be a Toronto guy in the Vancouver market. He spent eight years at 650.
“I did get a lot of people saying to me, ‘They don’t really take well to Toronto folk out there in Vancouver,’ and, honestly, from a work perspective, I never really felt that,” said Riccio.
Third star: Donnie and Dhali: The Team talking about Vancouver Whitecaps on Monday.
Taylor neatly brought up how the Vancouver 86ers kept pro soccer alive in the Lower Mainland between the two Whitecaps incarnations. “That to me is the most underrated franchise in Vancouver sports history,” Taylor said.
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