Canucks Daily: Wicked Cool Dates, Goalie Signings Galore

Anything tickle your fancy on the 2022-’23 Vancouver Canucks schedule? We can take a deeper look at it a little later once we see who’s shaping up as the stiffest competition, but for now just a couple of cool things jump out.

The season opening roadie is just five games this season, starting once again in Edmonton. In game four the Canucks will run into Johnny Gaudreau in his new home of Columbus. Hard to believe the team went 3-2-and-1 on the season opening six-gamer last season. It went south from there.

The home opener is against the Buffalo Sabres on October 22nd.

As part of a five-game road trip in mid-November, the Vancouver Canucks will play at the Toronto Maple Leafs in the ‘Hall of Fame Game’ on Saturday night, November 12th, two days before Roberto Luongo, Daniel Sedin, and Henrik Sedin get inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Nice job NHL and HHOF.

There’s no special homecomings this season for the BC Boys, unless you consider Curtis Lazar returning to Boston on November 13th a big deal. Kidding. Or maybe Ilya Mikheyev to Toronto for that game the night before. Neither is even ‘video worthy’, and we need to start drawing the line on this stuff anyway.

A bigger view and some more fun tidbits on that later, for now, we skate …

Speaking of Goalies

We kind of got into a little hypothesizing last night about the Vancouver Canucks, Michael DiPietro and the goalie depth chart, but while we were putting that together the San Jose Sharks were actually signing a goalie.

Kaapa Kähkönen signed up for two years at $2.750-million per season. The 25-year-old developed in his native Finland and then in the Minnesota Wild organization.

And just this morning, fresh breakfast news, the New Jersey Devils signed their recently acquired goaltender Vitek Vanecek to a three-year contract worth $3.4-million per season. Devils GM Tom Fitzgerald spoke to us about his goalie crisis almost exactly one month ago. He traded for the 26-year-old Czech on the 2nd day of the NHL Draft in Montreal.

Eddie Did Go

Eddie Olczyk played five seasons for the Chicago Blackhawks and then many years later became the team’s TV colour commentator for fifteen more. Chicago is his home.

Monday he decided to move on from the gig. Keep in mind, Pat Foley, a local legend in the market as the play-by-play man, is retiring and the team is gonna suck wind, so there’s two good possible reasons.

Olczyk already does national games for TNT Sports in the US and rumours have him also joining the Seattle Kraken on-air TV crew with our pal John Forslund.

By the way, bonus points if you recognize the sub-headline of “Eddie Did Go” as a play on the Hawaiian surf legend Eddie Aikau and the story behind “Eddie Would Go”.

Much Aloha!