Old article from 2007.
Good read..
Gina hows the bank account looking?
Lou was nothing but class answering media questions today.
c/p
Brrrrrrrr. A chill came over Gina Luongo as she spoke on the phone to her husband last June and learned that the couple was in for a serious latitude adjustment. Roberto Luongo, then the star goaltender for the Florida Panthers, had just been traded to the Vancouver Canucks, and he was crying as he broke the news from his parents' Montreal home. Gina, who'd just pulled up to her parents' house in sunny South Florida, tried to comfort him, but heading north for the winter didn't sound like much fun to her, either. The next day Gina got even gloomier after she looked at a map and realized that she and Roberto would be making a diagonal move across all of North America--no other two major pro sports franchises on the continent are so far apart. You've got to be kidding me, she said to herself. "They might as well have sent us to Alaska."
Nine months later Gina still hasn't embraced the rain and cold in Vancouver, or the 10-hour travel days (sorry, no nonstop flights) to and from her hometown of Coral Springs, but she and Roberto are, it turns out, in the place they want to be. For the first time in his seven-year career Luongo is headed for the playoffs. He may also soon be the most pivotal player in the Western Conference's postseason, the singular reason the otherwise ordinary Canucks can dream of outlasting the conference's elite into May or June. "If Louie gets on a roll, he can single-handedly change the outcome of a series," Vancouver center Trevor Linden says. "He's an intimidating guy. It took a while for us to realize that this guy is probably the biggest difference-maker in the game, and he's on our side."
No NHL team west of New Jersey relies more on its netminder than the Canucks do. At week's end Luongo, an MVP and Vezina Trophy candidate, led the NHL with 43 wins and was second among full-time starters in save percentage to the Devils' Martin Brodeur with a .921 mark. His 2,006 total saves were the most in the West. Thanks largely to Luongo, Vancouver, which missed the playoffs last season, had put together a league-best 28-5-6 run since Christmas and was perched atop the Northwest Division. Says St. Louis Blues coach Andy Murray, whose team was beaten by Luongo last month, "He makes them a definite Stanley Cup contender."
The tall, rangy Luongo, who turns 28 on April 4, has made a hockey-obsessed city believe he's the cure to nearly four decades' worth of pent-up frustration. The Canucks have never won a Stanley Cup, but the two netminders who got them to the finals--Richard Brodeur (1982) and Kirk McLean ('94)--are still adored around British Columbia, the former referred to around town as King Richard. Now it's all about King Louie, whose jersey outsells any other Canuck's more than 2 to 1.
"They've had a lot of goalies come and go here, and it's been kind of their Achilles' heel," says Vancouver defenseman Willie Mitchell, who grew up in nearby Port McNeill. "They've never felt like they had that dominant guy. Louie has a chance to be the one."
On a mid-March afternoon, as the Blues skated at GM Place the day before their game against the Canucks, Luongo sat in the luxury suite owned by the team's captain, left wing Markus Naslund, and spied on the competition. In truth, he was looking further down the road--he had playoff hockey on the brain. "I'm very fired up," Luongo said. "You just want these last regular-season games to fly by so we can get this going."
Though he is untested in the postseason, Luongo, with his size (6'3", 205 pounds), athleticism, exquisite technique and fierce work ethic, has, in the minds of many of his peers, already joined three-time Cup winner Martin Brodeur as the class of NHL goaltenders. Luongo is especially adept at covering ground and at his best resembles a sliding goalie in a tabletop hockey game, moving gracefully back and forth across the goalmouth while stopping virtually every first shot that comes his way. With his glove, Luongo is the most deft Roberto since Clemente. "If you have a young goalie and want to teach him how to play the position, you're going to watch how Louie does it," Linden says. "You're not going to say that about a guy like Marty or [the Red Wings' Dominik] Hasek, because so much of what they do is on instincts and feel."
As a child in the Montreal suburb of St. Leonard--the same one from which Brodeur, who's seven years older, hails-- Luongo had to get in the net if he wanted to play street hockey with the big kids on the block. He began getting shelled by tennis balls at the age of five and is still being peppered relentlessly as a pro. Picked fourth overall by the New York Islanders in 1997 (at the time, the highest a goaltender had been drafted), Luongo played 24 games for New York in 1999--2000. But after the Islanders took Rick DiPietro No. 1 overall in the '00 draft, Luongo was traded to Florida, where he was almost immediately under siege. In '03--04, when Luongo was a Vezina Trophy finalist despite going 25-33-14, he set an NHL record with 2,303 saves; the 2,275 he made in '05--06 rank second on the alltime list. "I felt like I had to be perfect, which was frustrating," Luongo says of playing with the Panthers. "If I wasn't on top of my game, we had no chance."
Luongo, however, found happiness away from the rink. He'd met Gina, then an aesthetician, after noticing her dining in her surgical scrubs at Pizza Time, the Italian restaurant near the Panthers' practice rink that had become his daily lunch stop. Luongo asked one of the cooks who the pretty woman was. "That's Bobby's daughter," the cook answered, referring to Umberto Cerbone, Pizza Time's proprietor, who often came out of the kitchen to converse with Luongo in Italian. Gina's connection to the restaurant presented a problem. "I was shy, and I was also worried about starting something that might not work out," Luongo says, laughing. "It could have messed with my meals."
After marrying Gina, Luongo, whose father, Antonio, came to Canada from Naples in the late 1970s, had no desire to leave Florida--even though he was toiling for one of the league's most hapless franchises and even though his relationship with then Panthers general manager Mike Keenan and other team officials was strained. In August 2005, coming off the lockout, Luongo was the first player ever taken to arbitration by his team. Luongo, whose contract had expired, had sought a long-term deal; instead, his fate was decided by an arbitrator, who awarded him one year at $3.2 million. "They were always telling me I was their franchise player," Luongo says. "It was kind of a slap in the face."
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1105305/index.htm
Good read..
Gina hows the bank account looking?
Lou was nothing but class answering media questions today.
c/p
Brrrrrrrr. A chill came over Gina Luongo as she spoke on the phone to her husband last June and learned that the couple was in for a serious latitude adjustment. Roberto Luongo, then the star goaltender for the Florida Panthers, had just been traded to the Vancouver Canucks, and he was crying as he broke the news from his parents' Montreal home. Gina, who'd just pulled up to her parents' house in sunny South Florida, tried to comfort him, but heading north for the winter didn't sound like much fun to her, either. The next day Gina got even gloomier after she looked at a map and realized that she and Roberto would be making a diagonal move across all of North America--no other two major pro sports franchises on the continent are so far apart. You've got to be kidding me, she said to herself. "They might as well have sent us to Alaska."
Nine months later Gina still hasn't embraced the rain and cold in Vancouver, or the 10-hour travel days (sorry, no nonstop flights) to and from her hometown of Coral Springs, but she and Roberto are, it turns out, in the place they want to be. For the first time in his seven-year career Luongo is headed for the playoffs. He may also soon be the most pivotal player in the Western Conference's postseason, the singular reason the otherwise ordinary Canucks can dream of outlasting the conference's elite into May or June. "If Louie gets on a roll, he can single-handedly change the outcome of a series," Vancouver center Trevor Linden says. "He's an intimidating guy. It took a while for us to realize that this guy is probably the biggest difference-maker in the game, and he's on our side."
No NHL team west of New Jersey relies more on its netminder than the Canucks do. At week's end Luongo, an MVP and Vezina Trophy candidate, led the NHL with 43 wins and was second among full-time starters in save percentage to the Devils' Martin Brodeur with a .921 mark. His 2,006 total saves were the most in the West. Thanks largely to Luongo, Vancouver, which missed the playoffs last season, had put together a league-best 28-5-6 run since Christmas and was perched atop the Northwest Division. Says St. Louis Blues coach Andy Murray, whose team was beaten by Luongo last month, "He makes them a definite Stanley Cup contender."
The tall, rangy Luongo, who turns 28 on April 4, has made a hockey-obsessed city believe he's the cure to nearly four decades' worth of pent-up frustration. The Canucks have never won a Stanley Cup, but the two netminders who got them to the finals--Richard Brodeur (1982) and Kirk McLean ('94)--are still adored around British Columbia, the former referred to around town as King Richard. Now it's all about King Louie, whose jersey outsells any other Canuck's more than 2 to 1.
"They've had a lot of goalies come and go here, and it's been kind of their Achilles' heel," says Vancouver defenseman Willie Mitchell, who grew up in nearby Port McNeill. "They've never felt like they had that dominant guy. Louie has a chance to be the one."
On a mid-March afternoon, as the Blues skated at GM Place the day before their game against the Canucks, Luongo sat in the luxury suite owned by the team's captain, left wing Markus Naslund, and spied on the competition. In truth, he was looking further down the road--he had playoff hockey on the brain. "I'm very fired up," Luongo said. "You just want these last regular-season games to fly by so we can get this going."
Though he is untested in the postseason, Luongo, with his size (6'3", 205 pounds), athleticism, exquisite technique and fierce work ethic, has, in the minds of many of his peers, already joined three-time Cup winner Martin Brodeur as the class of NHL goaltenders. Luongo is especially adept at covering ground and at his best resembles a sliding goalie in a tabletop hockey game, moving gracefully back and forth across the goalmouth while stopping virtually every first shot that comes his way. With his glove, Luongo is the most deft Roberto since Clemente. "If you have a young goalie and want to teach him how to play the position, you're going to watch how Louie does it," Linden says. "You're not going to say that about a guy like Marty or [the Red Wings' Dominik] Hasek, because so much of what they do is on instincts and feel."
As a child in the Montreal suburb of St. Leonard--the same one from which Brodeur, who's seven years older, hails-- Luongo had to get in the net if he wanted to play street hockey with the big kids on the block. He began getting shelled by tennis balls at the age of five and is still being peppered relentlessly as a pro. Picked fourth overall by the New York Islanders in 1997 (at the time, the highest a goaltender had been drafted), Luongo played 24 games for New York in 1999--2000. But after the Islanders took Rick DiPietro No. 1 overall in the '00 draft, Luongo was traded to Florida, where he was almost immediately under siege. In '03--04, when Luongo was a Vezina Trophy finalist despite going 25-33-14, he set an NHL record with 2,303 saves; the 2,275 he made in '05--06 rank second on the alltime list. "I felt like I had to be perfect, which was frustrating," Luongo says of playing with the Panthers. "If I wasn't on top of my game, we had no chance."
Luongo, however, found happiness away from the rink. He'd met Gina, then an aesthetician, after noticing her dining in her surgical scrubs at Pizza Time, the Italian restaurant near the Panthers' practice rink that had become his daily lunch stop. Luongo asked one of the cooks who the pretty woman was. "That's Bobby's daughter," the cook answered, referring to Umberto Cerbone, Pizza Time's proprietor, who often came out of the kitchen to converse with Luongo in Italian. Gina's connection to the restaurant presented a problem. "I was shy, and I was also worried about starting something that might not work out," Luongo says, laughing. "It could have messed with my meals."
After marrying Gina, Luongo, whose father, Antonio, came to Canada from Naples in the late 1970s, had no desire to leave Florida--even though he was toiling for one of the league's most hapless franchises and even though his relationship with then Panthers general manager Mike Keenan and other team officials was strained. In August 2005, coming off the lockout, Luongo was the first player ever taken to arbitration by his team. Luongo, whose contract had expired, had sought a long-term deal; instead, his fate was decided by an arbitrator, who awarded him one year at $3.2 million. "They were always telling me I was their franchise player," Luongo says. "It was kind of a slap in the face."
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1105305/index.htm
