With the 2010 Olympic Games on home ice, failure is not an option, and Canada's best chance of striking gold is without Burnaby Joe.

This year’s Montreal Canadiens have been a great hockey story. With no apparent big egos, they skate well, play up-tempo hockey, and, perhaps more than anything, they look like they’re having fun.

Their first outing may not have been the best evidence that the Vancouver Whitecaps have undergone a major overhaul. In many ways, this city’s top soccer club strongly resembled the group that had trouble scoring throughout much of last season, as it kicked off the new United Soccer League First Division campaign with a 1-0 win over the Montreal Impact on April 12.

The harsh reality of professional sports is that winning is the only thing that matters. In the eyes of ownership, it is crunch time. And Nonis just got crunched.

After a season of failure and almost four decades of relatively unspectacular accomplishments, the time has come for the Vancouver Canucks to realize that good enough is no longer good enough.

By ending the season with divisional matches, the National Hockey League ensured teams are forced to play—and win—meaningful games against their chief rivals.

Playing a key role on a hockey club in the thick of an NHL playoff race and weeks away from becoming a father for the first time, Vancouver Canucks centre Ryan Kesler is having the time of his life.

They have been called dull, boring, and not much fun to watch. Yet with each and every one of their recent results, the Vancouver Canucks have managed to take this city on a monthlong thrill ride—one that isn’t over yet. And as crazy as it sounds, and as inconsistently as they’ve played on many nights in recent weeks, the Canucks’ season may not be over for a while. Then again, it could all come crashing down on April 5.

Matt Pettinger is settling in to his new home with the Canucks, but admits that being traded for the first time in his professional career was unsettling.

When it came time to pull the trigger on a significant move, Nonis either didn’t have what other teams were looking for or wasn’t prepared to meet the hefty asking prices reported necessary to fetch a big name.

For the better part of two weeks, the Vancouver Canucks have been doing their part to stay with the pack in the Northwest Division and in the mix for a Western Conference playoff spot. They’ve been doing it by winning key games on their schedule. And as strange as it sounds, winning those games is the easy part. That’s because there have been—and will continue to be—nights when the Canucks aren’t playing but the teams they’re battling with are.

After 16 years in the U.S., Bobby Ackles returned to Vancouver and noted a decline in interest in football. Driven to action, the Orange Helmet Awards were born.

For years, it was expected: his hockey team needed a goal late in a game and Markus Naslund delivered. Times have changed, and so have the expectations for the long-serving Canucks captain. But with time ticking away both in last Sunday’s game against the Chicago Blackhawks and on his team’s playoff hopes, Naslund came through with his 20th—and easily his most important—goal of the season.

Considering that he faces slap shots for a living, you would think Roberto Luongo could handle just about anything else that comes his way. But in the week leading into last month’s all-star break—the last time Luongo played a home game at G. M. Place—it was apparent that the Canucks star netminder didn’t appreciate facing the heat in a hockey market like this one.

He hasn’t had to face them, or devise a game plan to beat them. That’s just fine with Wally Buono, because it’s allowed him to sit back and admire from a distance what the New England Patriots will try to accomplish by beating the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLII.