David Backes Rumoured to be on his way to the West Coast

Who likes rumours? Everyone! Matthew Sekeres is reporting that the Canucks and Blues may be working on a deal that would see the Canucks acquiring David Backes with Cory Schneider heading the other way. Apparently Mike Gillis decided last minute to skip the Top Prospects Game in Windsor in favour of the Habs-Blues game in Montreal, presumably to watch Backes.

Mike Peca Retires

Mike Peca called it a career today. Hardly a surprise given he hasn’t played a game this year, but still notable nonetheless. From a Canucks perspective, I will remember Peca for a couple of different reasons.
At the 1995 draft, then Canucks general manager Pat Quinn pulled off one of the biggest blockbuster trades in Canucks history.

MacLean-Gate

Alain Vigneault is fuming mad at a member of the media and his name is… Ron MacLean?! How weird is that? This, the same man who is beloved so much in this country that when the CBC decided to let him go, that the entire nation rose up and demanded (successfully) that he get whatever contract demand he wanted? A bizarre situation, indeed. For those that missed MacLean’s comments and Vigneault’s rebuttal:

Demitra to Play Saturday

Team 1040 is reporting that Pavol Demitra will likely make his season debut Saturday versus the Pittsburgh Penguins. Great news, now all they have to decide is where to put him. Has the second line of Samuelsson, Kesler, and Raymond shown enough to not get broken up? I’m not sure it has.

It appears Alain Vigneault isn’t ready to shake up his top two lines. Here’s what the lines looked like at practice today:

Burrows Beef

With a pair of goals on Monday against Nashville on top of last week’s NHL number one star of the week honour, Alex Burrows is red hot at the moment. But it’s the controversy that revealed itself on Monday night that is all anyone can talk about.

Henrikmania, Schneider-Lukowich Swap, Jannik “Dangerfield” Hansen and More!

After lets face it, a boring first 20-30 games this season, there are now lots of things going on in Canuckland. In fact, I can think of at least ten of them:

Burkie’s Boys: Team USA Reveals Their Roster

In dramatic fashion (thank you Brian Burke) at the Winter Classic, Team USA was revealed on Saturday. We tried to predict the roster back in August and did pretty well I think (we’ll happily accept accolades in the comments section). We correctly predicted all but four players correctly. Team USA was named with quite a few surprise omissions however. Lets take a look:

More Olympic Rosters Announced: Finland, Czech Republic, Germany and Switzerland

Yesterday we looked at Team Canada’s roster, but there were also a few other countries that announced their rosters for the 2010 Olympics that flew under the radar. Lets take a look: