First Star, Worst Star: February 14th, 2016

Happy Valentines day everyone! I hope you all got tons of chocolates and booze and were begrudged 20 minutes of love making by your poor significant other! And for those of you out there who are single here’s First Star, Worst Star to help take your mind off the fact you’re probably going to die alone!

If you’re like me the first thing you think of when you hear the name Lou Lamoriello is some kind of combination of “oldest living being on the earth”. Maybe you fall asleep thinking of all those years you’ve suffered through watching the New Jersey Devils slowly choke the life out of a hockey game by playing the trap. Or maybe you even chuckle to yourself thinking of the current misfortunes of the perpetually disappointing Toronto Maple Leafs. 

What you usually don’t think of is Lou Lamoriello spitting absolute HOT FIRE at Commissioner Gary Bettman! 

My favorite part is watching Bettman try to A) feign actual human emotion by pretending to understand the joke and B) stop his entire body from lunging forward and clinging onto Lou’s neck like some kind of blood sucking Leprechaun. It reminds me of that Simpson’s episode where Home draws a smiley face on his butt to mock Mr. Burns, so kudos to Gary Bettman for not having his goon squad empty out the Prudential Center! 

The Vancouver Canucks. Oh Canucks, what ever will we do with you? Your unparalleled ability to lose games in OT has you still kicking around the playoff bubble, and yet you have the same amount of wins as the perpetually underachieving Edmonton Oilers. Your entire offence relies on two 35 year old aliens who in true Canuck fashion will be traded away for a bunch of middling picks and prospects ANY DAY NOW. 

And your one offseason acquisition can’t even stay healthy long enough for us to laugh at how badly you overpaid him! That’s right, during his fourth game back from missing 33 games due to hernia surgery Brandon “Scored 40 Points Once 6 Years Ago” Sutter managed to take a puck to the face, and will now miss even more time while the Canucks still try and pretend they’re an actual threat to make the playoffs. 

It was a pretty terrible injury, but man, you have to think that hilariously inflated contract is honest-to-goodness cursed. 

Just minding his own business, when WHAM, drinking protein shakes three meals a day for the next few weeks. Thankfully Sutter has 4.5 million reasons over the next five years not to be sad. SERIOUSLY he makes just over $1.5 million less than Taylor Hall next year. Excuse me while I hyperventilate into this bag, giddily thinking about how bad the Canucks are going to be for the foreseeable future.  

Never change Canucks, never change; and by that of course I mean continue to hand out really terrible contracts to players not remotely worth the value (looking at you Derek Dorsett) while also running every single good goalie in the system out of town the second they’re ready to take on regular NHL duty. Man, I can’t wait for a few years from now, when I’ll get to watch the 40 year old Sedins score the only goals for the Canucks while they lose every game 5-2. IT’S GOING TO BE SO MUCH FUN!