Roberto Luongo didn't cost the Canucks the Cup. But will the Orcas see it that way?
Bobby Lou is a hard man to like. His swagger borders on arrogant; his moodiness makes PMS seem like a hangnail. And he'd prefer to throw his teammates under the bus than take responsibility... for anything.
But is he as bad as the Vancouver media makes him out to be?
I got absolutely hammered by irate readers in week two of the season when I used the words "seriously overrated" beside Luongo's name in my weekly Yahoo! article. You would have thought I'd stolen ice cream from a four-year-old – I was called things I've never even heard on the ice.
I'm not here to say, I told you so. That's not the point.
The shine is off Bobby Lou. I think his arrogance masks some serious insecurity – how else do you explain his mental collapses in Games 3, 4 and 6 of the Cup final? Or the queasiness in his game during the Chicago series? His butterfly looks stiff; his glove is suspect. And his athleticism – the stuff that made him a darling in Florida – has all but disappeared.
Opposing players aren't scared of him any more. And he knows it.
His contract is horrendous (11 more years at a cap hit of $5.333 million plus a no-trade). Vancouver's fans have turned on him. And after the Game 7 loss, he waxed on about the extraordinary pressure of playing for the blue-and-green…
Sure, he could rebound – Tim Thomas did it so why can't Bobby Lou?
One word: blame.
The opposite is responsibility and I'm sorry – Roberto Luongo just doesn't have that in his vocabulary right now. And it's not easy to find if you don't have it at 31. His mirror sees what he wants it to see, not what it needs to see. That's what makes him so painfully unlikable.
And unlikeable makes it difficult for fans to stand behind their man. We've already seen how his teammates turned the other cheek when first Shawn Thornton and then Tim Thomas fired pucks at him during warm-ups in the last few games…
A very smart American scientist by the name of George Washington Carver once said, "Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses."
Regardless of what needs to happen, I have a funny feeling that I'm only going to keep hearing excuses from out West.
And I'm pretty sure there's no Stanley Cup in that…