Canucks Roberto Luongo Joins the Injury List

I just received an email from my Vancouver Canucks E-news, that Roberto Luongo is sidelined with a hairline fracture to his rib. Cory Schneider has been called up from the Manitoba Moose to make the trip to California with the Nucks.

The loss last night was once again extremely costly, with not just the injury to Louie but also Ryan Johnson, who left the ice on a stretcher. That now brings the ever expanding total to eight in the first month.

Not sure which incident caused the injury, all I know is that I have seen a lot of teams running over Bobby Lou without having to answer to anyone.

Detroit (Tomas Holmstrom) and Toronto (Jason Blake) have had players in the crease knocking him down, wacking him with a stick to the back of the head and crashing him into his goal post. I think the latter was the one that caused the rib injury in the Detroit game.

It's about time the NHL started to protect all the goal tenders from this disregard for the masked ones.  Either that or you'll start to see some on ice brawls.

With all the call ups to the Nucks, the team is starting to resemble the Manitoba Moose.

We should see Andrew Raycroft in the net tomorrow against the Los Angeles Kings and the team had better pull up its collective socks, and produce a stronger effort.

The last two games against Toronto and Detroit has masked an obvious problem in defensive coverage and assignments. If not for Luongo's stellar play, this team would have been staring at two consecutive losses.

I'll speak more about the defense and the forth coming over-crowding, in my next article.