For a moment, it looked like Alexandre Burrows’ incredible story was going to have another amazing chapter. In Canada’s must-win quarter-final against Slovakia, Burrows scored his third goal of the tournament, putting Canada up 3-2. It looked like it might stand up as the game winner and carry Canada to the semi-final.

Instead, a series of poor decisions cost Canada the lead, then cost Canada the game.

It’s going to be a big offseason for Mike Gillis, who will likely be moving either Roberto Luongo or Cory Schneider some time before September in what could be the biggest deal since he arrived in Vancouver. But, as important as that deal is likely to be, the goaltending situation is hardly the most pressing issue on his plate. Regardless of which backstop the team keeps, the Canucks will be just fine in goal next season.

Priority number one for the Canucks this summer has to be solving the curious case of Alex Edler. Either the Canucks need to go out and get him someone to play with, or they need to move him as part of a package for someone that can anchor a top pairing in a way that Edler can’t.

David Booth created a lot of controversy when he first tweeted a picture of a bear he killed on a hunting excursion then shared the video of the event as well. Many people have strong opinions on the subject and it seems like no one can agree on any aspect of the story.

Well, thanks to CTV, we can all agree on one thing: CTV doesn’t know what a blog is.

Alex Burrows has scored his second goal in as many games since returning to the Team Canada lineup after his injury in the first game of the tournament. While it was a nice goal, it was just one of eight that Canada scored on Kazakhstan, who couldn’t repeat their gutsy effort from their overtime game against the US. It was probably too much to ask of the Kazakhstan to handle the US and Canada on back-to-back nights, and the game got silly in the third period as Kazakhstan simply looked worn out against Canada’s superior depth.

Fortunately, Burrows didn’t just score a goal. He also played a solid two-way game, seeing ice time in all situations, and was named the Best Player of the game for Canada. Even better, his wife, Nancy, and one-year old daughter, Victoria, were in attendance and got to see the whole thing.

Oh, and Burrows hugged Kazakhstan goaltender Vitali Kolesnik in the middle of the game.

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.

Today is May 11th, the day on which the Canucks were eliminated from the playoffs in 2009 and 2010. It was seen as a date of bad omen during last year’s playoff run as well, although they managed to survive it. This season, however, the team is long since eliminated and we’re already looking to the future.

Heading into this June’s NHL draft and the offseason, the Canucks are poised to make major changes to their roster. One of their goaltenders will likely be moved, and that trade should net the club significant assets. The team is likely to pursue much-hyped NCAA prospect (and West Kelowna native) Justin Schultz in the offseason, and certainly adding a player of that caliber would give the prospect pool a massive boost. Meanwhile Gillis has the 26th, 57th, 147th, 177th and 207th picks in the 2012 NHL draft to work with.

With all of the uncertainty, I figured we’d take stock of where the prospect pool is at for the moment. What are the clubs areas of strength, what are its needs and what players in the system are likely to play a major role with the team going forward?

The last time Alex Burrows scored a goal for Team Canada, he wasn’t wearing skates. Burrows was one of the best ball hockey players of all time, renowned for his offensive skill and on-ice vision, to the point that he was apparently called “The Goalmaker” by his ball hockey brethren.

On Friday morning, he made another goal happen, the first ever in his international career in ice hockey. In his first game since suffering a head injury against Slovakia, Burrows scored Canada’s first goal of the game, turning the tide against a Finnish team that was dominant early on home ice.

Burrows was the last forward added to the Canadian roster, likely for his ability to play a strong defensive role while still having solid offensive instincts and skill. He played both roles perfectly against Finland.

You’re looking at an infant, crown male Mangabey monkey that was born at the Jardin des Plantes’s zoo in Paris on March 5, 2012. The little guy is being bottle-fed because he was rejected by his mother at birth. Why is this on a Vancouver Canucks hockey blog?

The monkey’s name is Loango.

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.

Jannik Hansen is one of only two Vancouver Canucks at the 2012 World Championship, but he’s not the only player from the NHL on Team Denmark. He is, however, one of Denmark’s top players and one of the most important. That has already proven to be true just three games into the tournament.

Hansen was named Denmark’s best player of the game in a 2-0 loss to the Czech Republic, finishing the game with 4 shots on goal from the second line. He also received a 2-minute minor for boarding that turned into a one-game suspension, causing him to miss Denmark’s game against Italy on Sunday.

While 2-0 was a solid result against a team like Czech Republic, the most important games for Denmark at this tournament are against teams like Italy, who they will be battling to avoid relegation. Unfortunately for Denmark, they seemed to sorely miss Hansen against Italy, losing 4-3 in overtime.

The long awaited, much-ballyhooed meeting between Mike Gillis and the Aquilini Ownership group has taken place, and we have news to report: the Canucks’ General Manager has emerged from this meeting … still the Canucks General Manager.

The team announced Monday that Gillis’s contract as president and GM of Canucks Sports and Entertainment has been extended, although the duration of the new contract was not announced.

(This leaves the door wide open for endless speculation over the term. Is it a two-year extension? If it a 50-year extension!? There’s simply no way of knowing.)

I don’t have much to say about Gillis’s extension by itself. I’ve gone on record many times as saying I like the guy, so I’m happy to see him remain in charge. He’s made some mistakes in his time — with two years to evaluate it, we can safely say the Keith Ballard trade has been a bust, and the David Backes/Steve Bernier offer sheet scenario was a bit of a fiasco, in retrospect — but I like the way he runs the team overall, from the emphasis on advanced stats and other metrics, to the way the team manages the cap, to the way he and his assistants are always scheming bend the rules of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.

When Don Cherry joined Twitter at the beginning of March, I must confess I was hoping for more unintentional hilarity. After all, Cherry is 78 years old, which isn’t normally a great age to try and learn how to use a new technology. Combine that with Cherry’s propensity for political incorrectness and his twitter account had the potential for awesomeness.

Unfortunately, Don Cherry’s Twitter account ended up being pretty dull, consisting largely of him pointing out when a player is doing well and linking to Coach’s Corner segments on CBC. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at how quickly he adapted to using Twitter; he adapted to the advent of techno, after all.

The one instance where Cherry managed to provide the Twitter world with a little unintentional humour came a couple weeks ago, when he weighed in on the rumour that Luongo had asked for a trade.

It looks like Alex Burrows’ tournament might already be over in his first stint with Team Canada. Six minutes into the second period against Slovakia, Burrows left the game after an unlucky collision in the offensive zone. While it has not been confirmed, Burrows bore all the hallmarks of a concussion and may be done for the tournament.

If he is indeed diagnosed with a concussion, the focus changes from representing his country to the potentially long and difficult recovery during the off-season. At bare minimum, he is expected to miss Saturday’s game against Team USA.

I didn’t end up watching Canada’s first game of the tournament until the afternoon. I was anticipating a “Burrows Watch” throughout the World Championship, chronicling his performance at the tournament game-by-game, but it doesn’t look like that will be happening. If his tournament is indeed over, it will be heartbreaking for Burrows, who was so proud to represent his country after his unlikely journey to the NHL.

Pass it to Comics is a regular collaboration between PITB and cartoonist Chloe Ezra, whose Tumblr page, Blue Soup, is a must-follow for any Canuck fan with an appreciation for quirk. Today, Roberto Luongo is the victim of a misunderstanding.

One of the questions we’ve been trying to answer all season is whether the Canucks miss Christian Ehrhoff. This question usually focusses in on the gap in the Canucks’ top four defence corps on Alex Edler’s right side. The Canucks struggled to find a consistent partner for Edler and it showed in the playoffs. What should have been a breakout season for Edler, as he set a career-high in points and went to his first All-Star Game, fizzled.

But when it came to points from the blue line, the Canucks did just fine in Ehrhoff’s absence. In fact, the Canucks improved. In 2010-11, the Canucks got 157 points from their defence. This season, thanks to career years from Edler, Bieksa, and Hamhuis, as well as a mostly healthy season from Salo, the Canucks got 180 points from their defence. Just looking at points, the Canucks didn’t miss Ehrhoff at all.

There was one area, however, where the Canucks dearly missed Ehrhoff, and it happened to revolve around his deepest flaw: unpredictability.

We’ve been talking about Roberto Luongo’s suspected secret Twitter account since late February, but with the Canucks’ elimination from the playoffs and Luongo’s reported trade request, the antics of @strombone1 have spiked in a major way of late. The man has basically been writing this blog for us for a week now.

On Tuesday, the continuing adventures @strombone1 went national when CBC picked up the story in a piece by Karin Larson. Here’s “Luongo on Twitter?”, a CBC investigative report.

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.

If I were David Poile, Doug Armstrong, or Dale Tallon, this year’s nominees for GM of the Year, I’d be praying that the award goes to someone else. All you have to do is take one look at the season Mike Gillis has had to suspect that, maybe, the NHL General Manager of the Year award is cursed.

Gillis deserved the award after 2010-11 but, since winning it, nothing has gone right for him. He couldn’t sell Christian Ehrhoff on taking a haircut and forgoing free agency. All he could rustle up on July 1 was a clunky old Marco Sturm, hockey’s equivalent of snagging a boot while fishing. Six games into Sturm’s tenure, he was moved to Florida along with Mikael Samuelsson for David Booth, who underwhelmed. Samme Pahlsson, acquired at the trade deadline, earned praise during the regular season, then withered in an arduous, 5-game postseason.

But Gillis’s worst move on the surface — the one that really hurt his approval rating — was the Cody Hodgson trade. Not only did many, many fans fall out of love with Gillis over this one, which yielded no immediate payoffs, but on Monday, Gary Roberts, trainer to the young stars, called the Canucks’ GM a moron and a dud.

Last year, it was all accolades for Gillis. This year, the Quinoa King of the East is calling him names. What the Hell happened?

Normally, when we feature videos on Pass it to Bulis, they are made by other people. Not this one. This is a PITB original. I should clarify: Harrison might want to avoid all association with this video, because it contains a very silly song and Harrison is a very serious person. Not me: I revel in silliness.

You see, when I’m not writing about hockey, I often write comic book-inspired songs under the name Hooray for Gooba about evil twins, dinosaur fighters in space, big-headed supervillains, and time travel shenanigans. This weekend, however, I wrote a different type of song. A love song. A Trevor Linden love song.

And now I want to share it with all of you.

Pass it to Comics is a regular collaboration between PITB and cartoonist Chloe Ezra, whose Tumblr page, Blue Soup, is a must-follow for any Canuck fan with an appreciation for quirk. Today, Alex Burrows and Duncan Keith get used to playing together.

Some hockey games yield great stories, heroes, big goals, and clutch plays. This post is not about those games. This post celebrates weirdness, a quality of which the 87 games of the Vancouver Canucks’ 2011-12 season (and playoffs) had in spades. In fact, there were enough odd little moments this year for us to create a list of our favourite 10 bloopers of the 2011-12 season. What follows is a countdown of the funniest, oddest, and most unexpected stuff that happened on the ice during those 87 games.

For my money, the relationship between Roberto Luongo and the city of Vancouver has never been healthy. When you stop and think about it, it’s always sort of seemed like two people headed for a failed marriage.

First, there were the initial stages, when the City was over the moon for the guy, maybe even infatuated in an unhealthy way. We’d never been treated this well by anyone. That warped into a panic that he was too good for us and he might realize it and leave, which caused us to clamour for a promise, a marriage we weren’t quite ready for, a contract lasting forever. Not long after we got it, our fickle, immature hearts turned once again, and we realized how long “forever” truly was. Suddenly the whole thing soured, as we settled into routine. Then came the hardships, as the rigours of marriage (in this case, the Chicago Blackhawks) made him look human. Suddenly, the infatuation was lost, and that thrilling fear that he might leave us was replaced by a dull wish that he would. (How did New Jersey make it look so easy? Marriage is hard.)

Then someone new came along, and we felt that initial rush of excitement and infatuation for the first time in years. We wanted out, but we felt guilty asking, so we treated the guy like dirt in the hopes that he would suggest we end it. Then he did, and as we realized a major point in our lives was coming to an abrupt end, we began to re-examine the whole relationship, and suddenly found the lost memories of when we loved him the way we love the new suitor now. We couldn’t help but look back and wistfully reminisce about how it used to be.

It looks to me like Canuck nation has arrived at that final stage, the outpouring of all that lost emotion. As we approach the seeming end of Luongo’s tenure in Vancouver, I’d expect many more touching Roberto Luongo tributes like this one, titled “Live Forever”.

There were plenty of interesting statements in Mike Gillis’s epic season wrapup press conference Tuesday morning, but one of the most jarring came in response to the very first question posed to him by the press. To kick things off, David Ebner of The Globe & Mail asked Gillis when the “issues” that ultimately led to the Canucks’ early exit first began to surface.

As a disciple of the extremist “Church of Hockey Math” (trademark, Blake Price), I’m always skeptical of a statement that lends this much power to an “intangible” force like “collective team emotion.” It’s a pretty dubious claim when you stop to think about it: a veteran team, one of the league’s best over the past two seasons, saw their season derailed by a regular-season win in early January?

If you follow this blog with any regularity, you know about the Wellwoods, PITB’s official women’s road hockey team. Back in February, we helped them to find two sponsors to pay for a jersey upgrade — BC Diabetes, an organization dedicated to providing no-cost treatment to diabetics, and Ken Johnson, a nice young man and cat owner just looking for his soulmate.

But soliciting for money to buy clothes isn’t all the Wellwoods do. They also play street hockey, and back in October, they headed to Victoria for the 3rd annual HNIC Play On! street hockey national championships. The ladies have been involved in the tournament since its inception three years ago, finishing 4th in year one and 2nd in year two. Like the Canucks, they came into 2011 hoping to get back to the finals and achieve a better result. Could they do it?

No. They finished 4th. (We’re still proud of them, though.) However, they did take a step forward this year in terms of documenting the experience. Last year, Captain Morgan Tierney journaled the tournament for us. This year, the Wellwoods made a video. This is that video.

The thirteenth and final forward for Canada’s entry in the 2012 World Championships is reportedly Alex Burrows of the Vancouver Canucks.

Burrows has represented his country on the international stage before, but in ball hockey. He competed in the 2003 and 2005 ball hockey World Championships, leading Team Canada to gold each time. Being named to Team Canada in ice hockey is yet another chapter in Burrows’ incredible success story.

This time around, he likely won’t be playing as integral an offensive role, however, as the team already boasts talent like Corey Perry, John Tavares, Jeff Skinner, Patrick Sharp, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, and Jordan Eberle. Burrows’ skill on the penalty kill and defensive acumen likely played into the decision to add him to the roster (or maybe just the fact that he said yes).

There may be a bit of awkwardness in the locker room, though: Duncan Keith is one of the defencemen heading to Finland and Sweden for the two week tournament.