“Moore Must Pay.”
Those were the words Marc Crawford wrote in the Canuck dressing room at the 2nd intermission on March 8th, 2004. With the Canucks down 7-2 and the game already lost, that is what Crawford wrote.
“It was a cheap shot by a young kid on our star player!”
Those were the words Marc Crawford said after Steve Moore concussed Markus Naslund a week earlier.
Things are suddenly starting to make a whole lot of sense.
So I was right. And, while it wasn’t the most mysterious of conspiracies, it was me saying in August that the reason why Todd Bertuzzi and Marc Crawford were at such odds was because I truly believed that it was ex-Canuck coach Marc Crawford who ordered ex-Canuck Todd Bertuzzi to attack Steve Moore, and after Bertuzzi took the fall and the guilt, he wouldn’t listen to Crow’s caws anymore.
And can you blame him? Hell, if it were me in Bertuzzi’s situation having to come back to a coach who helped to hurt my hockey career I’d be tuning him out too. And perhaps that’s why a lot of other Canuck players did the same down the stretch which led the Canucks’ implosion in 2006.
Let’s think about this now. Marc Crawford was a ghost after the incident. Sure, it changed the very core of the Canucks with one punch, but it never seemed more apparent than with Crawford. He looked to be a shell of his former coaching self and it still looks like that today. Crawford made some pretty ill-advised decisions down the road of his coaching stint with the Canucks (Starting Auld over Hedberg in the 2004 playoffs, denying 3rd and 4th liners ice time, consistently putting Jovanovski out on the PK) and in truth, it never really seemed like a bonehead decision until after Crawford was fired.
Let me take you back to the conference call that Marc Crawford had after he was fired from the Vancouver Canucks. One quote really stuck out in my mind, and one really brought me to this conspiracy.
“To blame Todd [Bertuzzi] for everything that’s happened is … so unfair.”
And while Crawford didn’t come out and say “I ordered the attack on Steve Moore”, he might as well have had the writing on the wall and the guilt plea ready for the courts. And perhaps I’m giving Todd Bertuzzi too much slack; even though Crawford wrote “Moore Must Pay” on the walls, he probably didn’t order Bertuzzi to sucker punch him from behind and fall on top of him. Of course, the reality is that Bertuzzi was the one who attacked Moore, not Crawford. It only appears that Crawford was the one who handed Bertuzzi the gun, and Bertuzzi was the one who fired it. I think the next question should be who’s career ends first: Todd Bertuzzi’s… Or Marc Crawford’s?
