Roberto Luongo will go up into the Vancouver Canucks’ Ring of Honour on Thursday night, though some fans are still hoping for a massive fakeout that leads to his number being retired instead. After all, he deserves it.
In any case, the point is to honour Luongo, one of the greatest goaltenders in NHL history and the best that Vancouver has ever seen.
But let’s also remember that Luongo is a big ol’ weirdo. Over the years in Vancouver, it became clear that Luongo is secretly one of the funniest people in hockey and he became more and more willing to banter with the media and fans, whether in person or online.
Pass it to Bulis has a history with Luongo dating right back to his very first season with the Canucks — nearly three years before the blog even began. It’s a weird history. Let’s dive into it.
1 | That time Luongo was indirectly responsible for the name “Pass it to Bulis”
Long time Bulies will be familiar with the story of how “Pass it to Bulis” got its name but really, it’s Luongo’s fault.
The 2006-07 season was Luongo’s first — and Jan Bulis’s only — season with the Canucks. It was a major transition year, as Daniel and Henrik Sedin stepped up as the team’s scoring leaders ahead of the Todd-Bertuzzi-less West Coast Express, and Luongo put the team on his back and carried them to the playoffs.
Luongo’s first postseason start of his career was a legendary one. Game 1 against Marty Turco and the Dallas Stars went into four overtime periods as Luongo and Turco went save for save in a goaltending battle for the ages.
I watched this game with a group of friends and, as is tradition, we all picked the player we thought would score the game-winning goal in overtime. Most picked the usual suspects: Daniel Sedin, Markus Näslund, Brendan Morrison, and a vote for late-career Trevor Linden to pull off some more playoff heroics.
Not me. I figured the guy who comes through in the playoffs is often the player you least expect it to be. So, I picked the least likely hero: Jan Bulis.
My friends goodnaturedly laughed at the pick. In the first overtime period, I would jokingly suggest, “They should pass it to Bulis” every time the Czechian winger stepped over the boards. After that period went by with no one scoring, my friends started to join in the calls to “pass it to Bulis.”
The pleas to “Pass it to Bulis!” became more urgent in the third overtime period. Finally, in the fourth overtime period, with everyone exhausted and desperate for the game to end, we were crying out, “Won’t somebody please PASS IT TO BULIS!” when he wasn’t even on the ice.
Clearly, the game was only lasting so long because no one was giving the puck to Jan Bulis so he could end it.
Of course, the real reason the game went so long is that Luongo went into beast mode. He made 72 saves — then the second-most in NHL playoff history — to keep the Canucks alive in a game where they were out-shot 76-to-56.
So, in a way, Luongo is responsible for the phrase, “Pass it to Bulis!” embedding itself in my memory, eventually popping out when Harrison Mooney and I were brainstorming names for a new Canucks blog we were planning a few years later in 2010.
Bulis didn’t score that game-winning goal, of course. Instead, Henrik Sedin ended it on a pass from Daniel. The series went seven games, with Luongo ultimately outduelling Turco, who had three shutouts yet still lost the series.
2 | That time we unearthed @strombone1 as Luongo’s Twitter account
Luongo’s hilarious Twitter account was part of how he rehabilitated his reputation in Vancouver, shifting people’s perception of his personality from stick-in-the-mud to secretly hilarious and self-deprecating.
But there was a time when no one knew that @strombone1 on Twitter was Luongo.
Maybe it wasn’t the most hard-hitting of investigations but Pass it to Bulis was the first to publicly put together the evidence that the quippy Twitter account belonged to Luongo.
The @strombone1 account then got delightfully meta when Luongo started tweeting at @notbobbylu, a parody Luongo account, as if it was the real Luongo. It was utterly bizarre, as Luongo tweeted all sorts of encouragement at, essentially, himself.
It was the most unusual form of positive self-talk we’ve ever seen.
3 | That time we interviewed @strombone1 before he was revealed as Luongo
Before Luongo officially confirmed he was @strombone1 on Twitter, Pass it to Bulis interviewed the Twitter account via direct messages. It was weird!
The best moment of the interview, in my books, was when we asked which goaltender the Canucks should keep between Luongo and Cory Schneider — a major debate at the time — and he instead suggested they should go with Eddie Lack.
Considering both Luongo and Schneider were traded in the two years following this interview, that seems pretty prescient.
4 | That time Luongo picked his ten favourite Bruins fan hate tweets
Yes, this actually happened.
Luongo hilariously skewered his 2011 rival, Tim Thomas, in a tweet after Barack Obama’s reelection, albeit before the @strombone1 account was officially confirmed as being Luongo.
Some fans of the Boston Bruins laughed along with the tweet but some…did not. We asked Luongo to pick his ten favourite hate tweets that he received in response and, shockingly, he did it.
All ten of the tweets he picked were really mean! I’d hate to see the ones he didn’t pick.
5 | That time we serenaded Luongo with “Big Old Goal”
Everyone was expecting Luongo to get traded in 2013. Instead, Mike Gillis shocked the hockey world when he instead sent Schneider to the New Jersey Devils at the 2013 NHL Entry Draft for the ninth-overall pick, which he used on Bo Horvat.
Suddenly, Canucks fans were presented with the awkwardness of having to welcome back Luongo after essentially already saying goodbye to him.
We at Pass it to Bulis decided that the best way to welcome Luongo back was through song. So, we contacted a collection of Canucks Twitter personalities to come together to sing a big tribute song to Luongo in the vein of “We Are the World.”
Regrettably, I missed the taping of the video due to other commitments at the time. But my voice and guitar can be heard in the song.
Do you know who didn’t miss the taping of the video? Luongo himself, who agreed to a cameo appearance jamming to the song on his headphones. Luongo is the best, you guys.
6 | That time we got the first post-trade interview with Luongo
Eventually, Luongo was traded, sent back to the Florida Panthers on March 4, 2014. The trade came as something of a shock at the time. After all, the Canucks had just traded Schneider a year earlier so that they could presumably stick with Luongo as the number one goaltender long term.
The trade led to all sorts of farewell videos and musical tributes, like Harrison’s collaboration with Clay Imoo and Marie Hui on a parody of Adele, “Someone Like Lu.” That’s to be expected. Less expected is that Pass it to Bulis got the first exclusive interview — at least from the Canucks media — with Luongo after the trade.
I happened to be in Arizona on a family vacation to Seattle Mariners spring training at the same time that Luongo was swinging through town with the Panthers to face the then-Phoenix Coyotes. I requested and received a press pass, talked to the Panthers communications about what I was there for, and went into the room post-game for an interview with Luongo, who seemed absolutely stunned to see me.
That’s pretty understandable. A random game in Glendale was the last place Luongo was expecting to get interviewed by a member of the Canucks media.
It was a brief interview, as the Panther comms guy was basically breathing down my neck the entire time, but we talked about the readiness of Eddie Lack in Vancouver, how some of his post-trade tweets were misinterpreted, and, of course, how he had come to grips with saying farewell to Vancouver.
“I want to thank the fans again for eight years,” said Luongo. “It was a great ride and I look forward to playing there again in the future.”
7 | That time we sang one last song for Luongo: “I Will Remember Lu”
As Roberto Luongo went into the Hockey Hall of Fame, it was time to sing him one last musical tribute: a parody of Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You.”
Luongo didn’t make a cameo appearance in this one, unfortunately.
Congratulations on the Ring of Honour, Lu! Hopefully, the Canucks will get their act together at some point in the future and retire your number like you deserve.
