Anyway I think I have now worked out that the Canucks sit in the North West Division and are part of the Western Conference and that they play a phenomenal 82 regular season games. 82! And that doesn't even include the post-season. To me that's an incredible amount of action and it makes the footballer's moans about playing too many games in this country seem pretty ludicrous.
With playing so many games comes another unknown to this new, naive fan - road trips. In most British sports teams play no more than two away games in a row at any one time and for the majority of the season they play home, away, home, away and so on. I guess that with a country the size of the US it makes sense to go to an area of the country and get a whole host of fixtures done. One unanswered question I do have is around away fans, as far as I can see fans don't travel to away games, or perhaps don't during this early stage of the season. This may be something that I'll work out with time (or after asking a load of embarrassing questions on a message board). Either way the crowd at the Canuck's latest game seemed pretty thin - but I'll put that down to the Blue Jackets fans putting on a poor show.
Back on the ice the Canucks have begun a four-game road trip of their own and they've started it off with their first win of the season. I've already found that stats make up a big part of this game and in the build up to this match I learned that Vancouver had beaten their opponents four times out of four last season. So when they went behind twice in the first two periods I felt as though my will for the Canucks to win was somehow bringing the side down, like there was some kind of Karmic force looking down and shouting 'hey kid, you don't know anything about this game and you don't deserve to support a winning team'.
Fortunately that wasn't the case and for the second time this season Vancouver staged a fight back, only this time they secured a 3-2 victory to get this particular road trip off on the right foot. I'm going to reserve more in depth analysis until I can a) remember more than four of the players name, b) have some idea of what makes a good play/performance and c) work out what 'the slot' is!
