Veteran hockey writer Ed Willes takes an irreverent look back at the sometimes thrilling, often infuriating and always fascinating history of the Vancouver Canucks.Cheering for the National Hockey League’s Vancouver Canucks over the last half century has required patience, commitment and a forgiving nature. It’s not that the Canucks have been uniformly awful or drearily predictable. Far from it (as this past season would attest). But every time they seemed close to...

The wildest seven years in the history of hockeyThe Rebel League celebrates the good, the bad, and the ugly of the fabled WHA. It is filled with hilarious anecdotes, behind the scenes dealing, and simply great hockey. It tells the story of Bobby Hull’ s astonishing million-dollar signing, which helped launch the league, and how he lost his toupee in an on-ice scrap. It explains how a team of naked Birmingham Bulls ended up in an arena concourse spoiling fo...

Gretzky, Lemieux, Messier, Coffey, Fuhr, all on the same team — in their prime. The greatest collection of hockey talent ever assembled, playing the games of their lives.Three epic 6-5 contests between Canada and the Soviet Union decided the ’87 Canada Cup.Canada evened the series, after the Soviets won Game 1, when Gretzky’s fifth assist of the game set up Lemieux’s hat trick, ending Game 2 in double overtime. Game 2 is widely considered one of the greatest hockey games ev...