Long famous as one of the biggest party bars in Vancouver, the Roxy on Granville has just made the pages of the Washington Post.

Sports reporter Samantha Pell looks at the club's notorious history as a destination for visiting NHL players in a story titled "Is the Roxy Flu shot? Infamous NHL dive bar seems to have fallen out of players' favor."

First off, we know what you're thinking. Only a person who's never seen the inside of the Grand Union on Hastings or the pre-gentrification Cobalt would refer to the Roxy as a "dive bar". But give Pell a break. When you're from a major-league metropolis like Washington, D.C., every nightclub in a sad little backwater like Vancouver probably looks like something out of Barbet Schroeder's Barfly.

It's harder to argue with Pell's argument, namely that the rise of social media—Twitter and Instagram, not to mention StumpleUpon, Reddit, and Digg—has made it borderline impossible for professional athletes to party till they puke in public. 

Nowadays, a celebrity's every move is documented. So if a hockey player caught doing Cuervo shots at the Roxy on a Tuesday shits the bed at Rogers Arena on a Wednesday, it doesn't take long to connect the dots. 

The piece makes a case that the Roxy was party central for years, starting in the '90s. The bar was so notorious that the "Roxy flu" often led to subpar performances from visiting players during Canucks home games. 

Former Vancouver Canucks goalie Kevin Weekes is quoted as saying, “It has probably helped the home record of the Canucks. Certainly it was a big thing on the NHL radar back then."

But he also follows up with: "I don’t hear as many players talking about it now as probably back in my day. I think social media has changed a lot of things too—for the smart players.”

Instead, Pell's piece argues that modern NHLers are more likely to check out Vancouver's restaurant scene. 

One need only ask Canucks forward Jake Virtanen about the power of the Roxy. At the start of this year's training camp, the forward was called out on Twitter for partying at the club when he was supposed to be training, the story quickly burning up sports talk-radio shows in Vancouver. The only problem? It was all made up, the winger tweeting that he was actually in Abbotsford when Twitter had him dancing shirtless on a table to "Brown Eyed Girl" on Granville. 

 https://twitter.com/Jake_Virtanen/status/1036674830727143426

You can read  "Is the Roxy Flu shot? Infamous NHL dive bar seems to have fallen out of players' favor" here.