By: Brayden Fengler / December 17, 2023 The Canucks have played a total of 32 games so far this season, just under 40% of their total scheduled games over the 2023-24 campaign. Although this team isn’t even at the halfway mark on the year, anyone who’s watched the club over the past few years knows that this start feels different.
It’s not just the wins that are adding up but more how those wins have been earned that has stabilized a level of excitement in this City toward the Canucks.
Will these early glory days be sustainable for the Canucks? Maybe. But one thing is certain, while the team is good, and make no mistake, they are good, there are going to be a lot more eyes on them compared to the previous few seasons.
People Love Good Hockey
Few Canucks fans will need a reminder of the last time this team was this good, and this fun to watch. Even for Canucks fans that didn’t want a reminder of this, they got one during the Canucks game against Florida this past Wednesday as Roberto Luongo graced the ice for his ring of honour night.
Luongo played eight seasons with Vancouver, his best seasons during the team’s run for the cup in 2011 and the years immediately surrounding it.
Not only was 2011 a franchise high for the club in terms of performance but by the time the club was starting its playoff push, according to Google Trends, the “Vancouver Canucks” search term reached max popularity compared to all prior years of search trends tracked by Google.
This paints the obvious picture, that when a team is good, more people are interested.
The “Fair Weather Fans”
Anecdotally we all know who these people are. The fair-weather fan is that friend who shows up to the bar with an “I swear I’ve had this for years” jersey after the local team is on a run.
The colleague you overhear in the break room, that out of nowhere knows all the latest Elliotte Friedman talking points. Or that family member who asks you how much tickets cost these days, having not gone to a game since the days of the green men.
One thing I want to make clear if you’ve made it this far in the article, is that even by listing what I’ve just listed, it sounds like the start of a takedown piece on casual sports fans, but I promise you that’s not what this is. It’s quite the opposite, fair-weather fans coming out of the woodwork are the one true sign that a sports team is on the right track, and is something to be celebrated and cultivated by long-standing fans.
They Don’t Know the Pain
If you’re anything like me, you used to care, maybe too much, about the things you liked and how much other people liked them in comparison to you. It’s hard to own anything in Metro Vancouver as a full-grown adult, but when you’re younger you own even less.
However, the few things you do feel a sense of ownership towards are the things that you like and that you’ve attached your identity to. This can be anything: a movie franchise, a musician, or a sports team.
When interests are attached to identities in this way, it’s understandable why some folks get so worked up towards people who just take day trips into the subject matter they love so much. I believe that in sports this feeling of resentment toward fans who haven’t been around as long as others is stronger than in other areas of entertainment.
Unlike viewers of a fictional story, or groupies to a chart-topping musician, who are often hitching their wagon to a perpetually rising star, individual sports teams don’t operate under the same likelihood of continued success. Sports fans can often have to sit through years where their team’s star is doing anything but going in an upward direction.
However, when things finally do turn around for a given team and new fans jump on board, it can feel to some like watching someone cut the line at Disneyland. Sure we’re all getting to the same place now, but some of us have been waiting a lot longer.
I think this is the wrong way to look at new fans, and I hope that veteran Canucks fans can find it in their hearts to avoid this during the 2023-24 season. You can still say “Hey when they win it all, it won’t mean as much to them!” Because as a hardcore fan, you’re still right.
If the Canucks are ever so lucky to take it all home, the cheers of fans that just started watching this season, compared to the fans that sat on their parent’s lap and watched the game on a CRT TV will not register the same on the emotional rictor scale.
That difference will be its own individual reward to those fans who have watched this team through thick and thin. Cheers of joy made by new Canucks fans will not drown out those from lifelong Canuckleheads, they will only make them appear louder.
In a conversation I had with Ryan from PucksOnNet, he put it eloquently:
“It’s hard to knock fans for tuning out of the past few Canucks seasons. Year after year of uninspired hockey mixed with front-office turmoil, it didn’t exactly give people a lot of reasons to be excited about hockey in Vancouver.
Gatekeeping will be a thing in almost every aspect of life. If you’re not going to walk up to a kid in a Nirvana shirt they just bought at H&M and demand them to name five songs, you shouldn’t waste your breath or energy suggesting a fan’s opinions or viewpoints aren’t valid because they didn’t watch every single Canucks game in the 2021/22 season.
And to the people who have watched every game since Loui Eriksson scored on his own net on the opening night of the 2016/17 regular season, spending a lot of time watching something that sucks doesn’t give you any more clout or street cred than a “fair-weather fan”. Let people get excited about their local team being fun and exciting again. Because every type of Canucks fan knows, it won’t last forever.” – Ryan
The final note I’ll leave is this. The American author and die-hard fan of AFC Wimbledon, John Green, (whose work was something I attached my identity to as a Metro Vancouver youth), often recites this relevant quote allegedly attributed to Pope John Paul II: ”Out of all the unimportant things, football is the most important”.
In that spirit let us all welcome the casual, the short-term, and the fair-weather fans. Because just as John Pall II felt about football, we can all agree that hockey is an important thing, but it’s also an unimportant important thing, and there’s no need for exclusion in unimportant things.
Thank You
In addition to Ryan from PucksOnNet a big thanks to Trevor Beggs of Locked On Canucks and Daily Hive Vancouver, as well as Dan Machholz of the Books and Bodychecks podcast, whom I didn’t quote directly in this article, but who shared their time and provided their own insights on this topic to help me shape the piece that you just read.