Dude, Where’s My Towel? | Hughes for MVP & #EmbraceTheFake

Welcome to a (hopefully) weekly column called “Dude, Where’s My Towel?”. I’ll be taking a deep dive as the more numerically inclined people like to call it into the most recent episode of Power Of The Towel aka Power Of The Pure-L as long as we don’t have a date for hockey (I never claimed to be a marketing expert).

Before you go any further, listen to the full episode of Power Of The Pure-L — the under quarantined version of Power Of The Towel — right now. New episode coming out next Tuesday.

#embracethefake

It’s time for the city of Vancouver to #embracethefake and go all-in on a Canucks Stanley Cup in 2020.

There’s no downside to rooting for a Stanley Cup this year. If they win, they win the Stanley Cup in their 50th season — storybook stuff. If they get bounced then whatever, it’s a fake, fugazi cup.

Again, it’s a win-win situation. Imagine playoff hockey in August with the Car Flags aplenty down Cambie.

I think Andy Cole, producer of Halford & Brough on TSN 1040, did a good job laying down why Vancouver is getting the Cup once hockey comes back.

Jimbo On The Hot Seat

Perhaps the most interesting point raised by Andy was Jim Benning’s standing with the team if the season had continued.

Benning on the hot seat after a Canucks collapse would be PRIME Twitter content. And a quick cursory glance at the schedule pre-COVID makes it seem like it very much could have been possible. If quarantine has messed with your memory, in early March Vancouver suffered a crushing loss to Columbus on the road, then lost to Arizona at home a few days later.

They managed to end on a high note with a shootout win against the Islanders, but after that, it was going to be a tough four-game stretch against Arizona, Colorado, Winnipeg, and Tampa Bay.

No guaranteed wins there. They had games against Anaheim (two of them to be exact), LA and San Jose but those were not guaranteed in the slightest.

I think a “Jim Benning’s job saved by a global pandemic” bet back in October would have paid out at +30000.

Quinn Hughes for Calder? Nah, Hughes for MVP

Is Quinn Hughes already the best defenceman in Canucks history?

Obviously.

And he’s got a good chance to win the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s top rookie. But the current rage online is people debating who’s the Canucks team MVP is this season.

Markstrom is the presumptive favourite. Pettersson is getting a lot of love as well. But I was intrigued by a tweet that friend of the show and inaugural guest Rob Williams put out there.

Why not Quinn Hughes for Canucks MVP? Can you imagine the Canucks this past season if Edler was on the power play instead of Hughes? If Myers had to play even more at even strength? It would have been a disaster.

I will come back next week after consulting the fancy stats crowd to get a better handle on why the mighty Quinn should be team MVP. If anyone is reading this that fits that description, please DM me on Twitter. I got a D in Math 100 at SFU.

Jimmy Matheson, Hockey Writing Genius

The phrase “you think you know a guy” usually means that said guy has royally screwed up. But in this case, it’s completely the opposite feeling. We at the Nucks Misconduct network are real proud of ya, Jim.

And now, for something completely different

I’ll try my best with this next topic.

As I mentioned off the top of the episode, maybe it’s for the best that we don’t have sports right now. As friend of the show Thomas Drance said when he was on back in April, “Sports is the toy department of life”. Something we get to enjoy and play with when everything else is in order, or when we’ve finished our vegetables.

Well unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, the inequalities in society that have developed over the decades have come to the surface. Protests have sprung up all over the world, and they don’t look like they are stopping anytime soon.

I’ve been on this earth for 26 years now, and this is one of the biggest shifts in the public consciousness in my lifetime. Let’s not make this about us right now. Let’s listen to what black people have to say, and try to make a world a better place now and in the future.

Black Lives Matter.

And one last thing to end this. I want to end this with this powerful video I found on Twitter the other day.