By Joel Smart (The Cascade) – Email
Date Posted: October 3, 2011
Print Edition: September 28, 2011
With six inches in height and at least 20 pounds difference between them, it was quite a sight to see Mike Duco in a fist fight with Anaheim Duck’s captain Ryan Getzlaf during a Saturday night throw-away preseason game.
Duco isn’t the biggest contender for a roster spot, at just 5-foot-10 and 200 pounds on a good day, but he’s got the spirit of a wild stallion – he actually seems to be channelling Raffi Torres when he goes in for a hit. He can also get under an opponent’s skin with ease; he’s one of those players that you can only love when he’s on your team.
Proof of that is pretty easy to find. Duco received some serious scorn from Vancouver fans when his Twitter comments made it abundantly clear that he was not cheering for the Canuck’s during the playoffs. “2-1, lets go san jose! what is luongo thinking coming out of his net like that?” read a May 24 tweet from @Duco87. On June 6, his tweet was even more blatant: “sick of watching the sedins dive and lay on the ice.”
Of course, Duco was soon traded to Vancouver in exchange for Sergei Shirokov and his next tweet was that he was glad to be part of the Canucks organization. To be fair, we couldn’t have expected the guy to cheer for the good guys, since he’s originally from Toronto. All will be forgiven if he can fill the void the Canucks are currently seeking to fill.
It’s no surprise to anyone that the Canucks are in need of a role player after losing a lot of grit in the offseason. That is where the talents of Duco really begin to shine. Florida Panther Jason Garrison, a White Rock native who played with Duco, thinks the 24-year-old agitator will be a fan favourite in Vancouver, according to The Province. “He will provide so much energy. He’s small, but he’s super fit,” he said in an early-August interview. “He’ll go out there and hit everything in sight and he’ll fight anybody. That’s how he plays the game.” Prophetic words after the Getzlaf fight, but no one could have predicted Duco’s short-handed game-winning-goal in the previous game against Edmonton – a game in which Edmonton was highly favoured to win.
Duco is no stranger to scoring goals, though. He scored 20 and added 11 assists in his last season, playing for the Rochester Americans in the American Hockey League (AHL). But in the 12 NHL games he has had the opportunity to play in over the last two seasons with the Panthers, he has yet to score a point. If Duco were to make the line-up this year for the Canucks, it is unlikely he’d be expected to score goals; he’d be a fourth-line energy guy, wearing out the other team and hopefully keeping the puck in the opponent’s end of the rink. In fact, a much more relevant statistic than points scored might be the fact that he had 126 penalty minutes in 67 games with the Americans last season. However, with the way Vigneault likes to shuffle the deck when things aren’t working, he could potentially get an opportunity to test his offensive abilities.
Most likely, though, he won’t land a permanent roster spot, but he’s certainly getting himself noticed over the course of this preseason, and that certainly bodes in his favour. The fact that he also seems to be the player most willing to drop the gloves also makes him an appealing candidate, but only if he can be counted on to play responsibly. It’s all fine and good to have an agitator type on your team, but only if he draws more penalties than he takes.
