To Know Messier is Apparently to Know the Canucks

This really shouldn't enrage me as much as it does. But it does.

Canucks.com has a trivia game that many of you, I'm sure, have played. It usually has great questions about the team history, like who scored the first Canuck goal. But it's been polluted somewhat. I took the quiz today and 6 of 10 questions were about a person we all prefer never to think about.


That's six questions about Mark Messier.

It's been discussed before how bad Mark Messier's tenure with the Canucks was, and how little the team loves him. I don't want to go into it.

What I'd like to talk about is that the Vancouver Canucks submitted these questions. Playing the quiz right now, you're more than likely to run into at least three of these six Messier questions -- normally, playing the game over and over, you will run into a different question every time, but right now, the same ones seem to be looping. Why is that?

It's easy to see how someone who first heard of the Canucks yesterday might say, "Oh hey, this is cool, Mark Messier used to play with the Canucks. Why don't people discuss this?" Again, rather than give a list of reasons, I'll just point to how his time with the Canucks ended: he was bought out. While the historic Gretzky trade pointed out that ANYONE can get traded, not ANYONE can get bought out. A buyout is a team saying "We'd rather pay you NOT to be on the team." That's how bad Messier was.

These questions are primarily about the things Messier did while not on the Canucks, cause that's where his accomplishments occurred. For instance, did you know that in 1994, Messier led the New York Rangers to a Stanley Cup championship? You did? Odd that so many Canucks fans would know that.

I don't know why anyone making decisions about content on Canucks.com would want me to remember Mark Messier, especially that Cup he won with New York, but I frankly think it's a bad call. If it's part of the "40 years" thing and I start seeing Messier promotions or something, I'll be ridiculously unhappy, but for now, this little message of protest is enough.