Luongo’s early season struggles

Vancouver Canucks' captain and backbone, goaltender Roberto Luongo, has admittedly started the season off slowly. On the radio yesterday, Canucks colour-man Tom Larscheid was critical of the goaltender’s early season play. According to good ol’ Tom, the Canucks would be 6-2 if their goaltending was a little bit better.

Roberto Luongo

On Tuesday night the Boston Bruins came to town and beat the Canucks 1-0 on a first period goal by Michael Ryder. Looking at the final score and the stats-sheet you would think that Luongo had a pretty solid game. After all he only let in one goal, and the Canucks weren’t able to generate any. You can’t win a game unless you score at least one, so I don’t think Luongo should be blamed for the loss. Having said that however, the Ryder goal should never have gone in.

Luongo made the initial save on a bad angle shot from the left wing corner, but poked the puck out in front of the slot area, pretty much right onto Ryder’s stick. Not many NHLers are going to miss from that range. The Luongo we are used to seeing would have eaten up the rebound, or deflected it into the corner or some other harmless area of the ice.

Many feel that Luongo’s “struggles” are due to the added pressure of being the captain of the Canucks. He is an emotional guy, and critics feel that the C has been a distraction preventing him from being able to lock in and focus on what he does best, and that is stop pucks and swallow rebounds.

I don’t really know about this…in looking at Roberto’s track record since coming to Vancouver, I have noticed a bit of a trend of slow starts. I guess we’re so accustomed to stellar performances that just good isn’t acceptable. Regardless, I expect the captain of the Canucks to be in top form soon

-By Aleem Peermohamed