Living in Vancouver for the last seven years, I can echo many of the sentiments in the article about the city's relationship with the team. The sports media here is so relentlessly awful and quick to point fingers and it bleeds over to the large number of casual fans here. Every team has bandwagon fans - the Flames are no exception - but the bandwagon relies on the media to keep it on course, and when the front page of the sports section is jumping to conclusions and advocating for drastic reactionary measures, well, that's what your fans are going to be like too. If the sports talk radio and the newspaper said that Luongo sucks, well, you better trade him. It's made me extremely sympathetic towards Lu because not only did he get jerked around by his own team, but the entire city turned on him every time he had a bad game.
When the Canucks are winning, the fans are insufferable because the media (sometimes literally) starts planning the parade. When they're losing, no one cares. At all. The apathy in the city over the Canucks right now is amusing. Watching the implosion close-up while the Flames are having an awesome first year of the rebuild has been very enjoyable.
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