Category Archives: Vancouver Canucks

Canucks’ Roberto Luongo drops longtime agent, hires high-profile J.P Barry-Pat Brisson duo

Posted on by

By Brad Ziemer, Vancouver Sun July 24, 2013

VANCOUVER — Vancouver Canucks goalie Roberto Luongo has dumped his longtime agent and is now being represented by the heavyweight duo of J.P. Barry and Pat Brisson of CAA Sports.

Barry confirmed Wednesday that the change was made earlier this week. Luongo was previously represented by Gilles Lupien, who negotiated the 12-year, $64-million deal that Luongo signed with the Canucks in 2009.

There has been considerable speculation that Luongo is unhappy about the recent turn of events that saw Cory Schneider, and not him, traded away by the Canucks.

Barry would not directly comment on the reasons for the move, but said he plans to meet soon with general manager Mike Gillis and assistant general manager Laurence Gilman.

“I think I am going to have to reserve comment for a while,” Barry said. “We need to get up to speed and take some time. Obviously we are coming on to a difficult file and we need to give him proper advice and we need to take some time here, talk with Roberto, talk with Mike and Laurence. There are media reports and then there’s talking to the parties. We’ll take the time to do that over the next little while here … we’ll try and reach out to them in the next day or two.”

Barry said he’d prefer to let Luongo comment directly on the reasons for the change in representation.

“I think Roberto will probably make some comments, but in discussing it with him he felt he needed to perhaps find some different representation,” Barry said. “I’ll let him speak about that, but that is the position he took.”

Luongo has nine years remaining on his deal, which carries an annual salary cap hit of $5.3 million. So why would he need a new agent now?

“There’s a misperception about what agents do in the business,” said Barry, who also represents Daniel and Henrik Sedin. “We do more than just negotiate contracts. Our job is to guide players and their careers year to year and whether it deals with public relations or it deals with marketing or it deals with many, many other different things, obviously he is a star player and has been one of the best goaltenders in the world for a long time, so we’re here to help him out.”

Gillis travelled to Luongo’s home in south Florida early last week to meet with him.

“I have full confidence in Roberto and I have full confidence that he’ll be here and that is how we are operating,” he said after a promotional event with season-ticket holders at Rogers Arena on Tuesday night.

“It was fine, it was good,” Gillis said of the meeting. “It was fun. It was amiable. It wasn’t stressful. We talked about the team and we talked about the coaching change. We talked pretty well about everything we could possibly talk about. I told Roberto how I felt about him and how we felt about him as an organization.

“We talked about a variety of different things. All-in-all, we spent about 3½ hours together. I’m not sure how to describe it. It was just a normal conversation with a guy that I have known for a while. I didn’t leave with any sense of trepidation.”

Asked where he felt Luongo was emotionally, Gillis declined to answer: “I’m not going to talk about that,. There are some things that will remain private.”

In an email last week, Luongo said he had been asked by the team not to comment on his meeting with Gillis.

New Canucks coach John Tortorella also told reporters Tuesday night that he was confident Luongo would be back.

“I think he is a hell of a goalie and we are going to jump on his back,” Tortorella said. “You don’t go where you need to go if you don’t have goaltending. Everybody I have talked to, and I have only spoken to him once and never face to face, everybody says he is an absolute pro and a great guy. So I have tried to leave him alone, let him think this out and get his head wrapped around it. I think he’s going to be fine.

“He’s our guy, he’s our guy, we will not have any sniff at all if we don’t have him as our goalie. I have full confidence that he is going to respond and that he is going to handle it and will be fine.”

Gallagher: Luongo needs a short memory to resume role as one of NHL’s best goalies

Posted on by

By Tony Gallagher, The Province July 4, 2013

Assuming Roberto Luongo doesn’t refuse to report to the Vancouver Canucks this fall, he’ll be coming back looking to regain his top form as one of the best goaltenders in the NHL.

That’s what he’s been for many years and, while he’s been through a heap of turmoil over the last year or two as Cory Schneider emerged as a player, finding a way to overcome and essentially forget about that past and worry about the present is going to be his biggest challenge. What’s really interesting is that goaltenders who have reached Luongo’s level of success are already enormously qualified to do that with great aplomb if they get some help and lean on the techniques that have let them forget about bad goals that all goalies have given up, says Vancouver sports and performance psychologist Dr. Saul Miller.

“If your goal is to be the best you can be under any circumstance which is generally the goal of all professional athletes, when stuff happens in life, you either use it or it uses you,” said Miller. “When you have a bad experience, how do you use it?

“It’s difficult to say anything specific if I haven’t met or worked with the player, but you know that you can help the person. How you would help is difficult to say without an intimate relationship with the person and with what’s going on in his life. But, in general, a pro-athlete who has had moments of being one of the best in the game and moments of inconsistency in high pressure, highly visible situations has to have a short memory and tune out the past. He’s got to work on the ability to treat it like the last goal. It’s always the next shot. Regardless of what happened in the past, it’s always the next shot and there are techniques to focus on the present and not on the past. It’s that way for all of us in life.”

Miller works with eight current NHL players and has worked with players currently on the rosters of over half the teams in the league, as well as players and teams in Europe. He’s worked with NFL and major league baseball players and teams and has a wealth of experience. And he’s certainly not pandering for a job because he’s knows the Canucks already have, or at least had, former Boston University sports psychologist Len Zaichkowsky working with the team. But he’s worked with lots of goaltenders over the years so his observations might be interesting with Luongo very much on the menu these days.

“A goalie stops thousands and thousands of shots as he comes up through the ranks, in practices and games, and what he does in sticking out his right leg or his blocker is automatic. When you start thinking and it intrudes on that automatic process, that’s when your performance goes down,” said Miller.

Needless to say, a strong start will be crucial for Luongo and the team as it faces increased competition for a playoff spot given realignment. The traditional October swoon the goalie has traditionally experienced over the years is not going to go over well if it happens again this fall. Not only would it hurt the locals, it might well sink Lui’s chances of pursuing that second gold medal at the Sochi Olympics, something he might get a shot at with a strong showing out of the gate.

The high level of success Luongo has experienced would give him a strong sense of self, one of the keys to personal success, according to Miller, and Lui tapping back into that strength will be one of the keys if he is to succeed — along with superior preparation.

“When a hockey player has a strong shift or makes a good play he knows ‘that’s me’ which is learned behavior over the years,” said Miller when talking about sense of self. “But when there’s a bad shift or say defenceman makes a bad giveaway, he knows ‘that’s not me, I always make that play.’ And using techniques like that he can forget the mistake, forget the past.

“Goalies face more pressure in the game than any other player and perhaps more than anyone else in sport. Some say a cornerback in football has the toughest job, to make reads then a snap decision and when they get burned they look really bad. But goalies certainly have the most pressure in hockey and Jacques Plante said it best years ago when he said: ‘Can you imagine a game when every time you make a mistake a red light goes on and 15,000 people stand up and cheer?’ You have to be in the right physical and mental state to be able to manage that kind of work.”

tgallagher@theprovince.com

twitter.com/tg_gman

© Copyright (c) The Province