Ryan Shannon leads the Canucks in goals, power play goals and has played on the top two lines throughout the first three regular season games. So it’s no surprise that on Thursday, Canucks Senior VP and GM Dave Nonis announced that the Canucks had re-assigned Shannon to the team’s minor league affiliate, the Manitoba Moose. Uhh wait, what?

It was expected that head coach Alain Vigneault would send a message the day after an 8-2 loss at the hands of the Philadelphia Flyers. A bag skate, a long day of watching tape, maybe a line shake-up is what most people would have expected, but I don’t think many (including myself) thought it would come in the form of Ryan Shannon being sent down to the minors. Shannon began the season with big expectations as he - along with Mason Raymond - was labeled as being one of the answers to the Canucks scoring problems. Putting the first game against the Sharks aside, the Canucks haven’t had trouble scoring early on and neither has Shannon. In fact Shannon, who has seven shots this season, has had many chances to score.

Evident yesterday, however, the Canucks have had plenty of trouble defensively and with their effort. And although Shannon was given every opportunity to succeed offensively - and he did to a certain extent - something tells me that he wasn’t pulling his weight defensively, away from the puck in the eyes of coach V. This definitely sends a message, it says that there is no room for error. Bold moves like this one weren’t unfamiliar last season (Trevor Linden: a healthy scratch, first powerplay unit; Jeff Cowan’s increased ice-time) as Vigneault had a happy trigger finger. Luckily for Canucks fans, his aim was dead on.

Source: http://canucks.nhl.com/team/app/?service=page&page=NewsPage&articleid=339792

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Blogroll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.