Vancouver is a hockey town, through and through. When it comes to the quality of our city’s fans, not too many places can compare with us. We’re right up there with Montreal, Edmonton and Toronto. Being so passionate for the game causes us to put all of the Vancouver Canucks, along with the team’s coaching and management staff, on a pretty high pedestal.

Due to this pedestal, Canucks’ history can be broken down into pretty definitive time frames. There was the pioneer expansion days of the 1970s and Orland Kurtenbach. Next was the Stan Smyl-led run to the 1982 Stanley Cup finals, where the Canucks battled valiantly but were swept by the dynastic New York Islanders. Recently, the Canucks have made do with the West Coast Express line of Markus Naslund, Todd Bertuzzi and Brendan Morrison, but the Steve Moore incident was the beginning of the end of that.

All of these players and eras are respected periods of the franchise, and all of them have their highlights and lowlights. However, no player in Vancouver Canucks history has been more immortalized than Pavel Bure, the Russian Rocket.

Bure came to the Canucks the way he left them: controversially. Vancouver chose him in the sixth round, 113th overall, in the 1989 entry draft. This was the year the Soviet Union was collapsing and the iron curtain fell, and ex-Soviet players began fleeing to North America in droves. When the Canucks selected Bure, there was an instant uproar from many of the other teams at the draft. It was common knowledge among team general managers that Bure hadn’t played enough games to be eligible for the draft that late in the selection process. However, through some, let’s say, creative bookkeeping, Vancouver scouts managed to convince the NHL that Bure had played enough and was Vancouver property.

The reason for such fiery controversy was because Bure was considered to be one of the draft’s elite prospects. He wasn’t chosen earlier asNHL clubs were still leery of using their high draft picks on foreign players who might never cross the Atlantic. Bure was a superstar as a junior player; his remarkable scoring achievements at the World Junior Championships, where he won top forward in 1989, had garnered him enough attention from scouts for him to be heralded as one of the best unsigned players in the world.

Bure joined the Canucks two seasons later and immediately displayed why all the other teams at the 1989 draft combine were up in arms. In his first NHL season, he scored 34 goals with 26 assists for 60 points and took home the Calder Trophy as the league’s rookie of the year.

Things only went up after that. The next two seasons, Bure had duplicate years of 60 goals and set a club record that still stands today of 110 points in a season, which he set in his sophomore season. His mark of 60 goals in a season is also a team record.

In 1993-94, Buremania really took off. Bure merchandise ranked right up with the likes of Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux in terms of sales. That was the year that he, Trevor Linden and Kirk McLean led Vancouver to the Stanley Cup finals for the second time in franchise history. In the playoffs that year, Bure solidified himself as one of the most memorable players the city had ever seen. In 24 playoff games, Bure scored 16 goals, 15 assists and 31 points, which was good enough for second in playoff scoring. Bure’s shining moment came in game seven of round one against the Calgary Flames, when he scored the series-winning goal in overtime on a breakaway. The Canucks eventually lost in game seven to the New York Rangers in what has been called the most entertaining final in hockey history.

Without a doubt, this was Bure’s highlight with Vancouver. The next season, the first NHL lockout wiped out half the year. Bure still produced at a point-per-game clip, but that was the end of the good times, and the end was near. The year after, Bure played just 15 games as he suffered his first, but not his last, major knee injury. The next year wasn’t a standout for Bure either, as his knee problems lingered, but after that, in 1997-98, he returned to form, playing the entire season while scoring 51 goals and 90 points to finish third in the league in scoring. 1998 would boast another historic moment for Bure. He captained Team Russia in the 1998 Olympics and scored a phenomenal nine goals in six games, including five in the semi-final game, which is largely considered to be one of the finest individual performances in history. Russia took silver.

Unfortunately, these would be the final times Bure would suit up for the Canucks. The team was among the worst in the NHL, the coaching staff was in disarray, and Bure had many, many problems with both the city and team management. Bure’s tenure in Vancouver had been marked by a number of notable incidents. Bure had struggled with the Vancouver media during his entire time here, partly due to his originally poor English skills and partly because of his Russian heritage, which doesn’t treat strangers, as the media was to Bure, the same way that North American culture does.

Bure was always viewed as an outsider. There were mysterious allegations of possible Russian mafia ties, his increasingly frequent injuries that the media began to accuse were staged and perhaps most importantly, his legendary contract issues with the Canucks. On almost every deal Bure and his agents negotiated with the team, there were problems.

When the Canucks first drafted Bure, his Russian league team maintained that he was still under contract with them. The Canucks and CSKA Moscow entered into bitter negotiations over how much Vancouver would have to pay the Russians. It eventually came down to an impasse over $50,000, and a frustrated Bure agreed to fork over his own money to settle it.

Another example, on Bure’s second contract, both sides managed to hammer out an agreement after prolonged talks. Everything seemed to be in order until Bure discovered that the team had put all of his payments in Canadian dollars, not American ones, which is the NHL standard.

Bure refused to honour the final year of his contract with Vancouver, and he sat out almost all of 1998-99, demanding a trade. Eventually, the team dealt him to the Florida Panthers. In Miami, Bure rediscovered his game and once again became a scoring machine, tallying 152 times with Florida over parts of four seasons in 223 games. In 2000 and 2001 he captured the Maurice Richard Trophy as the league’s leading goal scorer.

After that, injuries would hamper Bure’s career. He would play two short seasons with the Rangers before retiring in 2005 after playing 702 games, scoring 437 goals, adding 342 assist for 779 points. Bure was named Vancouver’s most exciting player five times, Canucks’ MVP three times, led Vancouver in scoring four times, played in six NHL all-star games, was a 1994 league first team all-star and has had numerous international accomplishments. He just missed out on getting into the Hockey Hall of Fame the last two years.

What makes Bure so special and so worthy of remembrance right now is that Vancouver is without a player like him, and has been for a long time. The franchise is at a period where we don’t have that “it” factor like we had in the past. We’ve never before or since had a player of such game-breaking skill and ability as Pavel Bure. In his prime, Bure was among the world’s fastest players. Every time he picked up the puck in his own zone, the entire stadium would stand up. He stands out as the team’s best-ever draft choice, one of the only gems our eternally suffering scouting staff has unearthed. He is one of the most electrifying players the game has ever seen. He could score from anywhere on the ice, he had blazing speed, his deking skills were incredible and his shot was one of the most powerful and accurate in the NHL.

There is still a tremendous amount of bitterness towards Bure from the city and the team. His fabled #10 is still not hanging in GM Place’s rafters, and there is a mystifying longing for a player of his calibre to come around again, like a wolf howling to the wind. He made hockey what it is in this city, and no one can ever take that away.

Vancouver has always loved its hockey heroes. In recent times those have included Naslund, Bertuzzi, Ed Jovanovski, the Sedin twins and Roberto Luongo. None of those however have captivated the city like Bure did. None had the unsolved allure that Bure had with Vancouver. It’s almost like a first love that never lasted. New things come along, but none of them are quite the same.