Veteran hockey writer Ed Willes takes an irreverent look back at the sometimes thrilling, often infuriating and always fascinating history of the Vancouver Canucks.

Cheering for the National Hockey League’s Vancouver Canucks over the last half century has required patience, commitment and a forgiving nature. It’s not that the Canucks have been uniformly awful or drearily predictable. Far from it (as this past season would attest). But every time they seemed close to delivering the ultimate prize to their fan base—the indomitable faithful—they slipped on a banana peel and tumbled straight into the abyss.

Most of their failings were self-inflicted. The franchise’s ownership history is as uneven as its won-loss record. But some have been so random and so accidental, the faithful can legitimately wonder what they did to anger the hockey gods. It started in 1970 with a spin of the carnival wheel, which gifted Hall of Fame centre Gilbert Perreault to the Buffalo Sabres and left the Canucks with Dale Tallon. And it’s continued uninterrupted for over fifty years.

For decades, veteran Vancouver hockey writer Ed Willes has had his own vantage point on this team that has, in his words, “been haunted by dark and unnatural forces since its inception.” And Willes’s knowledge extends far beyond the most infamous chapters of the story. As this irreverent, often bitterly funny chronicle shows, the litany of woe stretches back farther and runs deeper than many Canucks fans realize, and stars several of the biggest names in hockey history.

Willes’s account tells the story of a uniquely confounded franchise and its obsessive followers, who have thus far been denied the thrill of a Stanley Cup championship. Their consolation has been the dubious comfort of wallowing in collective misery.

Before retiring in 2020, Ed Willes spent nearly four decades in sports journalism, working everywhere from the Regina Leader-Post to the Winnipeg Sun and, most notably, the Province newspaper in Vancouver, where he was a regular columnist for more than twenty years. He is the author of Gretzky to Lemieux: The Story of the 1987 Canada Cup and The Rebel League: The Short and Unruly Life of the World Hockey Association.

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