Everyone has or will have a story of an athlete they watched when they were younger who will attain a mythical status in their heart. A person that you wanted to emulate, someone you pretended to be when you played ball hockey in the road. The “Kobe!” of tossing paper balls into a trash can, except for me it was shouting “Hasek!” and charging out of my net to take out someone’s legs. Someone whose impact over the course of time will fade away as the younger generation comes along, and you find yourself being “OK, Boomer”-ed as you try to explain how great they were.
“No, seriously, Hasek was the greatest goalie of all time. You have to understand, he shut down Canada by himself in the ’98 Olympics, he dragged a Buffalo Sabres team with a roster led by Mike Peca as their elite scoring threat to the ’99 Finals, and he won around 28 Vezinas. Plus he did a lot of cool bendy things in net.”
For many people in Vancouver, that player was Pavel Bure. And if you think Elias Pettersson was met with a lot of hype and excitement, then you should meet the Russian Rocket. The buzz around Bure was made even more special as it was done in a time when hyping up a player had to be down with stick drawings and lighting three giant bonfires across the city any time Bure scored a goal, instead of simply retweeting the latest GIF of his on-ice wizardry. For a city that lived and died off of its blue-collar work ethic (i.e., something low-skilled teams pride themselves on), Bure was the first guy that made you believe in a future where the Canucks might actually be a team that could outscore its opponents in bunches.
It was also special because Pavel Bure was the first true superstar the Vancouver Canucks ever had. Don’t get me wrong, they had several skilled players come through the organization, but Bure was the first guy who was known by EVERYONE around the league. He was a guy who created actual debates about if he was the best player in the league, and there were no debates about if he was the best goal scorer in the league. He forced the East Coast to know who the Vancouver Canucks were, with the apex of it coming in 1994 when the Canucks trounced Don Cherry’s favourite Maple Leafs team and booted them out of the playoffs, with a sad Felix Potvin slumped over in his net wondering where it all went wrong.
As with Dom Hasek, though, a lot of Bure’s brilliance was lost to time. And not just in the general sense that time has passed, so fewer people talk about him, but in the sense that the video of Bure’s prime isn’t on YouTube and what footage does exist is scattered around the Internet. Or the footage is sitting on someone’s VHS tape in a closet at Rogers Arena and, even worse, is shot in standard definition.
“You see that smudge there? That’s Hasek doing three cartwheels and then ninja-kicking the puck away at the last second. I assure you this is an amazing save.”
Today, if Pettersson sneezes, there are 10 high-definition GIFs to save it for posterity, but for the Bures and Haseks of the world, a lot of their brilliance is hard to find. Which is why Kevin Wong’s work on putting together 85 minutes of Pavel Bure’s history is so damn impressive, and so damn important. Not only does he weave together audio commentary of Bure’s dominance, but he also gathered the most Bure footage in one spot I have ever seen. He also resisted the early-2000s trend of overlaying the entire video with a Drowning Pool song at full blast, and instead weaves in commentary, the on-ice sounds and fan reactions to the Bure highlights.
when I talk about my shyt.
meanwhile, I have to depend on niqqas hoping they had a camcorder and still have the VHS cassette of the games.
