Silver lining: The Canucks never had The Crap Mantle

There were some truly great moments in the 2016-17 Canucks season. Henrik Sedin scored his 1000th career point, a gorgeous goal on former teammate Roberto Luongo. It was so good even Alex Edler smiled. At 21, Bo Horvat emerged as an offensive leader for the Canucks. And other young players like Troy Stecher, Nikita Tryamkin, Brock Boeser, and Nikolay Goldobin gave us glimpses of hope for the future.

But all of that pales in comparison to the Canucks’ greatest accomplishment: they never bore the ignominy of The Crap Mantle.

Longtime Bulies will be familiar with The Crap Mantle, an idea borne out of one our early podcasts. Here’s a quick refresher: The Crap Mantle is an anti-title bestowed upon the first team to lose a game in the regular season. That team is, by definition, the worst team in the NHL. Anyone who loses to the worst team in the NHL is obviously worse than the worst team and are the new bearers of The Crap Mantle. And so on and so forth.

Whichever team ends up with The Crap Mantle at the end of the season is therefore the absolute worst team in the NHL, far worse than the team that has the worst record or fewest points.

Is the mantle a sleeveless cloak, a covering that provides an incandescent light, the region of the earth's interior between the crust and the core, or something more metaphorical? We’ll leave that for you to decide.

This year’s winners of The Crap Mantle and therefore this year’s biggest losers: the Toronto Maple Leafs.

There’s a certain beautiful symmetry in the Leafs winding up with The Crap Mantle: they started the season with it, losing to the Ottawa Senators in the very first game of the 2016-17 NHL season despite Auston Matthews scoring four goals in his NHL debut. And they ended the season with it, losing to The Crap Mantle’s previous bearers, the Columbus Blue Jackets, in their final game of the regular season.

It’s a clear sign of their inexperience: a veteran team never would have lost to the Blue Jackets knowing The Crap Mantle was on the line. It's also a bad sign for their playoff hopes. How can the worst team in the NHL hope to compete against all the other teams that are so very clearly not the worst team in the NHL.

As for the Canucks, they avoided The Crap Mantle by savvily never playing a team that had it. Sure, that’s an incredibly low bar, but they cleared it.

Here is the complete record of The Crap Mantle over the course of the season, as tracked by loyal Bulie Crystal240. She is the best.