Spitballin’ (or Super Pass It To Bulis: All In, if you love adventurous acronymizing) is a feature that allows us to touch on a multitude of things really fast, because in the world of hockey, there are always lots of things to find and colour. Here are a few quick topics.

Spitballin’ (or Super Pass It To Bulis: All In, if you love adventurous acronymizing) is a feature that allows us to touch on a multitude of things really fast, because in the world of hockey, there are always lots of things to find and colour. Here are a few topics that deserve mention.

Under normal circumstances, I’d say it’s hard not to feel bad for David Booth, what with the terrible luck he’s faced as a Canuck. But as we’ve covered extensively on this website, people really dislike him, be it for his exorbitant contract, his outspoken faith, his affinity for hunting, his lack of production or all of the above. On Monday, when we suggested that the lack of news about Booth was an indication he might be out for the season with an ankle injury (which appears to be the case), one follower responded, “Karma!” as though Booth deserved a season-ending injury. That’s absurd to me, but I don’t think that follower was alone in his thinking.

Still, if you can put aside for a moment the intense dislike that orbits Booth like a small, somewhat unfair, slightly irrational moon, then it’s hard not to feel bad for him. After all, the winger has been plagued by rotten fortune since he was acquired last fall.

First there was the knee-on-knee collision with Colorado’s David Porter, for which Porter missed five games to suspension but Booth missed 18 with an MCL injury. In the 62 games he did play, Booth put up 16 goals for a 20-goal pace, a nice, round number that would have earned him much softer treatment from the Vancouver faithful had he hit it, but thanks to the injury, he didn’t, and hockey fans aren’t in the business of giving credit for projected scoring. The raw fact was that Booth earned $4.2 million for 16 goals. That wasn’t good enough.

His sophomore campaign has been plagued with even more injury trouble. After the lockout (during which Booth did little to ingratiate himself to Canuck fans, filling his timeline with evangelical platitudes and kill shots), Booth strained his groin in the team’s first practice. He missed 15 games.

Then, after returning for 12, Booth sprained his ankle Saturday versus the Detroit Red Wings. According to the Canucks, he’s now out “indefinitely”.

David Booth has received his share of criticism from Canucks fans, essentially centred around his lack of production compared to the size of his contract. His start to this season hasn’t helped matters: he has zero goals and just 1 assist in his first 8 games. Considering he’s currently the fourth highest paid forward on the team, it’s understandable why some fans would be upset.

Still, there’s no need to be quite as upset as many are. Given the scoring chances that he has created recently, Booth shouldn’t be goalless for long, and he should start picking up more assists as well, if his chemistry with Zack Kassian over the last few games is any indication.

In addition, I believe that much of the criticism of Booth stems from unrealistic expectations, created by both his contract and a flawed perspective on what it means to be a first line, second line, or third line player in the NHL.

Every now and then we like to take a break from all the words and just post some numbers. And some words describing the numbers, as otherwise it would just be a whole bunch of numbers with no context, which would be really weird. Here are some odd and interesting numbers and statistics from the Canucks season so far.

The Canucks are going to be in a very strange and unfamiliar situation on Tuesday: everyone will be healthy. Or, at least, as healthy as they can possibly be this season, considering Manny Malhotra is evidently done. On Sunday night, Alain Vigneault made the announcement that David Booth was cleared to play and would be back in the lineup at some point during the Canucks’ upcoming four-game road trip.

Astonishingly, in the time it took Ryan Kesler and David Booth to return to game action, no one else on the roster suffered a new injury, meaning the Canucks needed to clear a roster spot to reincorporate the shoot-first winger. With Jordan Schroeder playing well, that left three options: Andrew Ebbett, Andrew Alberts, and Cam Barker.

Because the Canucks are committed to keeping both Alberts and Barker in the package, where they’ll be worth more someday, Ebbett was placed on waivers Monday. Like the rest of the Canucks, he’ll be heading to Chicago. Unlike the rest of the Canucks, he’ll be staying there, so long as he doesn’t get picked up by another team.

Let’s take a look at what Booth’s health means for the Canucks (beyond the fact that they’ll be able to play him now).

On Monday, Canuck nation got some bad news, as David Booth missed the second day of the abbreviated post-lockout training camp with a sore groin. Tuesday, the news regarding Booth’s groin got even more grim: not unlike an elusive Albertan mountain goat, Booth killed it. He’ll be out 4-6 weeks with a strained groin.

Thus, if you were already somewhat disillusioned to learn that Andrew Ebbett and Jordan Schroeder would be battling it out to see who centred Mason Raymond and David Booth in the absence of a rehabilitating Ryan Kesler, consider that they’re now battling to see who centres Mason Raymond and… someone.

And frankly, while Booth’s strained groin was bad news for the entire Canucks organization and their fans, I’d argue that it was especially bad for Jordan Schroeder’s chances to win that battle.

David Booth isn’t particularly popular among Canucks fans. His twin habits of hunting and tweeting about hunting have not endeared him to Vancouver’s more lovey-dovey population (that is, those who love doves and other assorted animals). Moreover, his conservative Christianity and tendency to express that conservative Christianity publicly were intolerable to those who preach tolerance.

Throughout the lockout, I saw calls for the Canucks to trade him immediately, while others suggested using one of the amnesty buyouts that the new CBA would surely provide to send him packing. The public sentiment appeared to be: Get. Him. Out of here.

Then the lockout ended. Hockey returned. Training camp started. And Booth came down with a groin strain and went in for an MRI on Monday. Suddenly, Booth wasn’t so easily dispensable, as Canucks fans remembered that with both Ryan Kesler and Booth injured, the Canucks are down to having just one-third of a second line.

Without hockey, it was easy to advocate getting rid of a player for non-hockey reasons. As soon as hockey came back, people seemed to remember that Booth is pretty good at it and the Canucks probably want him around.

Long before he was a Vancouver Canuck or the executioner of the great creatures of myth, David Booth was a child. It’s true. And, like, almost every 10-year-old that goes on to play in the NHL, his superior hockey skillset was on display even then.

As evidence, I submit to you this recently unearthed video of a 10-year-old Booth scoring the overtime winner in the semifinals of the 1994 Brick Super Novice Hockey tournament. That’s him, wearing number 7, just as now, and taking a feed from a young Corey Potter before dangling the opposing netminder into oblivion and sending the adorably-named Detroit Honeybaked on to the tournament final.

By now, it should be perfectly clear that David Booth doesn’t care what you think. Well, he sort of does. I mean, the other day, he sullenly tweeted, “Every time I tweet I lose followers”, but when several responses explaining the phenomenon came back to him — stop tweeting photos of things you done killed, bro — he chose not to change his spots, like a leopard (and then he probably killed a leopard).

On Thursday, Booth successfully ended the life of yet another beast and saw fit to share it with his squeamish audience. That’s what you’re looking at above.

But what the heck is what you’re looking at? As Roberto Luongo tweeted in response, “Ok NOW you are just making up animals no?” Is that a goat of some kind? A four-legged Appalachian Fearsquatch, as Justin Bourne suggested? The Forest Spirit from Princess Mononoke?

The species of the dead thing above may be unclear, but one thing does seem clear: with so much time on his hands, David Booth has grown weary of hunting things that exist and crossed over in the realms of lore. “There’s only one trophy in the world harder to get than this… And I’m getting that next,” said Booth, ominously. Lock up your fictional characters, people, because David Booth will be trying to kill them for as long as the lockout endures. What follows is a preview of what we can expect Booth to tweet in the months to come:

It’s time once more for Ask it to Bulis, where two incredibly intelligent, witty, handsome, and humble bloggers answer your questions about life, the universe, and everything, but mostly the Vancouver Canucks. Side effects include enlightenment, rationality, and gangrene.

Some time ago, David Booth killed a bear. You probably remember.

It’s funny. Canuck fans had known since the day he arrived that Booth was an avid blueberry preservationist/hunter. No one batted an eye. Heck, when he announced he was embarking on a bear-hunting expedition, tweeting that he was in Alberta “hunting Bruins”, we chuckled. But then he tweeted a photo of the dead bear, followed closely by a documentary on how the bear became dead, and suddenly, the fact that he had, like, killed a bear became real.

Totally legal, not that uncommon. But it was just too much proof, especially for those of us who aren’t so into hunting and try to keep our timeline twitpic-of-dead-animal-free. The backlash was intense, and one got the impression Booth would think twice before sharing another shot of something he shot.

Nope.

Sometimes when I get curious enough about something to investigate it, digging up statistics and putting together charts, the answer turns out to be the obvious one. Fortunately, it can also turn up some other interesting information along the way.

Here’s the question I had: which wingers were most effective with Ryan Kesler last season? One of the big questions coming into this season is who should play on the second line with Kesler, once he returns too early? David Booth seems to have his spot all sewn up, but there are many competitors for the opposite wing, including Chris Higgins, Mason Raymond, Jannik Hansen, Zack Kassian, and Nicklas Jensen. Heck, if Shane Doan signs with the Canucks, you can add him and Alex Burrows to that list.

David Booth and Chris Higgins were Kesler’s most common linemates last season, but were they his most effective linemates? To get the answer, I did some WOWY (With Or Without You) analysis to see how Kesler performed with and without various linemates. In this case, the answer appears to be pretty definitively “yes.”

It’s the offseason, which means the Canucks are off doing all sorts of things that have nothing to do with hockey, such as run secret Twitter accounts, promote Panini America, recover from shoulder surgery or, in the case of David Booth, get a new pet.

A new pet pig.

Before you get any funny ideas: no, he doesn’t plan to shoot it, and he’s not using it to lure a larger animal. Booth plans to love it. But first he has to name it, a task with which Canuck fans attempted to help Saturday night.

Naming animals is fun. The Bloggess has a kitten named Hunter S. Tomcat. My wife and I plan to eventually get a puppy and name him Werner Herzdog. In the case of David Booth, it looks like the pig will be dubbed Sir Francis Bacon. But there were some other very excellent ideas that missed the cut.

David Booth achieved a remarkable feat in his first season in Vancouver: he made fans wish that he would go to the net less often. That’s astounding. For years, fans have griped that so-and-so doesn’t go to the net, and at some point, every single Canuck is that so-and-so.

But Booth? He does it too much. That is a stunning reputation to have.

It’s also pretty silly. It’s not difficult to understand why Booth goes to the net so hard: that’s where he does his best work. The man scored 16 goals last season, and nearly every last one of them came within two feet of the crease. If you knew that’s where all your best things happened, why would you go anywhere else with it?

David Booth wasn’t what Canuck fans expected him to be. He was billed as a power forward of sorts, as well as a linemate for Ryan Kesler, and neither of these things appeared to be quite true after a good long look at the guy. Also he was being paid $4.2 million and only scored 16 goals. Also he killed a bear. For these reasons, he was viewed as a disappointment.

But it’s not that cut and cry. Booth may not have looked like Ryan Kesler’s lifelong twin, but the two drove possession like gangbusters when they were on the ice together. He may not have established himself as a prototypical power forward, but those are basically leprechauns, and Booth was hardly a weakling around the goal. Furthermore, he may have only scored 16 goals as a Canuck, but he only played 56 games. That’s a 23-goal pace, which is decent for a second-liner.

In short, while Booth wasn’t what we thought he was, he was still quite effective, and there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about Booth’s second full season in Vancouver. Here are 16.

Hey, remember that black bear that David Booth horrified everyone by killing two weeks ago? I have some good news and some bad news about that. The good news is that we now have footage of the bear walking around, doing just fine, tipping over a steel drum — you know, typical happy, unshot bear stuff. The bad news is that the bear is only like that for the first half of the video. Then David Booth shoots him in the gut with an arrow. Yikes.

The latest episode in the ongoing saga of David Booth vs. nature comes to us the same way as all the other episodes, via David Booth’s Twitter account. On Saturday afternoon, he tweeted a video of the kill with the following disclaimer: You have every right not to watch just like i have the right to choose to hunt.

Please keep that in mind before you click play. This ain’t no Charmin Ultra Soft commercial.

David Booth has been completely open about his affinity for hunting since he came to Vancouver. At that time, we were all a little bummed to have lost bear fighter extraordinaire Tanner Glass to the Winnipeg Jets, so the fact that Mike Gillis went out and got another bear fighter to take his place was amusing.

Booth discussed his bear hunting on Hockey Night in Canada After Hours, talking about how the black bears he hunts “eat up all the blueberries, and we don’t want that.” We chuckled. How quaint. And heck, even when Booth tweeted on Monday that he was “In Alberta trying to kill a few Bruins,” we laughed and made jokes about how we hoped he wasn’t sitting outside Alberta-born Johnny Boychuk’s house.

But then on Tuesday Booth actually tweeted a photo of a dead black bear and suddenly everything got real and everyone was horrified.

Advanced statistics and quantitative analysis have consistently proven useful in hockey, but any honest hockey math nerd will admit that there are factors the numbers can’t quite measure. Some things operate on the U.S. Supreme Court’s “I know it when I see it” principle. Supposedly, one such unmeasurable factor is chemistry, which has been a major talking point among Canuck nation of late.

During the regular season, David Booth played roughly 35 total even-strength minutes with the Sedin twins. He played more with former Florida Panthers teammate Tomas Kopecky. Yet, with the team facing elimination in Game 4 of the Canucks’ first round series with the Los Angeles Kings, Alain Vigneault modified his lines, bumping Booth up to the top line to skate with the twins. That alteration to the team’s forward lines separated Booth from Ryan Kesler, his linemate all season.

Despite being somewhat bemused by Booth’s move to the Sedins’ right wing, many cheered the split from Kesler, as the two apparently have “no chemistry.” Oh, but they do.

Spitballin’ (or Super Pass It To Bulis: All In, if you love adventurous acronymizing) is a feature that allows us to touch on a multitude of things really fast, because in the world of hockey, there are always lots of things to find and colour. Here are a few quick topics.

There were a number of storylines heading into Saturday’s Hockey Night in Canada match-up versus the Buffalo Sabres. There was the obvious one, as Cody Hodgson returned to Vancouver less than one week after being traded to Buffalo, but there was also the undercard of the Olympic re-match between Roberto Luongo and Ryan Miller in the same building where Team Canada won the gold medal two years ago.

Oh yeah, and Christian Ehrhoff returning to Vancouver for the first time since leaving for a bigger contract in the summer. And Alex Sulzer was there.

But it turned out the real storyline was a desperate team battling for a playoff spot coming out firing on all cylinders against a complacent team sitting comfortably in first place. The game was essentially over after 5 minutes, but my job wasn’t. I didn’t just watch the first period, I watched this game.

Canucks fans who were sad to see Cody Hodgson leave on Monday at the trade deadline didn’t have long to wait for him to return to Vancouver. He’s back in town tonight, albeit with the Buffalo Sabres. Also back is Christian Ehrhoff, who left town in the offseason, signing a 10-year, $40 million deal with the Sabres. Both Hodgson and Ehrhoff make me think about how our perceptions of players are formed. In particular, they make me think of David Booth.

Halfway through the first period of Tuesday’s game against the Colorado Avalanche, David Booth made a power move off the boards around Shane O’Brien towards the slot. Avalanche forward Kevin Porter moved into the middle of the ice to help his teammate, but couldn’t reach Booth with his shoulder to deliver a legal hit.

Instead, he stuck out his leg and caught Booth knee-on-knee. Booth immediately crumpled to the ice in obvious distress. Porter received a five-minute major for kneeing and a game misconduct.

After the game, Avalanche coach Joe Sacco complained about the penalty calling it a “marginal call.”

Pass it to Comics is a biweekly collaboration between PITB and cartoonist Chloe Ezra. It will run on Tuesdays and Thursdays throughout the season. Today, David Booth makes his own luck.

Vancouver fans are flying high after last night’s 6-2 shellacking of the hated (and objectively evil) Chicago Blackhawks, and understandably so. While the Canucks have alternated hot or cold like they’ve been treating a sinus headache (or stimulating a nipple) for the first month and a half of the season, they put in a hot sixty minutes in Chicago, where cold performances are infuriating and common.

Still, while almost everything was coming up roses for the Canucks, it’s tough to miss that, in a 6-2 win, former Floridians David Booth and Keith Ballard both somehow managed to finish at minus-2.