Mats Sundin Signs With Vancouver ... Finally

After more than eight months of waiting -- counting from the ignominious end of the 2007-08 regular season in Toronto, when he exercised his contractual right to veto a trade -- free agent center Mats Sundin finally decided that the best place to spend the balance of this season was with the Vancouver Canucks.

The price: $7 million, for what will amount to a little more than three months of work -- more if the Canucks manage to make the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

The reaction: It all depends on where you sit. In Vancouver, there's nothing but elation, as a lineup that's already in the hunt for the playoffs is about to be supplemented by one of the game's legitimate superstars. And what fan of the game can't be intrigued by the prospect of Sundin playing the pivot between Henrik and Daniel Sedin -- except perhaps the play-by-play man who suddenly finds his tongue tied far more often than not.

In Toronto, the city that Sundin called home for so long, and one he refused to leave when the Maple Leafs were desperate to do a deal that could have supercharged the franchise's rebuilding program, it's safe to say that anger and resentment are winning the day. As the flagship Maple Leafs blog, Pension Plan Puppets, puts it, this isn't the time for a rational reaction. Instead, the Toronto faithful will wait out the rebuilding program, and give their hero his due at some future date to be determined. But that day is not today.

If you're in New York, or any one of a few other cities who seemed to believe they had a legitimate shot at landing Sundin, it's time to start scrambling for a backup plan. One wonders what the Rangers, a team in desperate need of bolstering its offensive punch, can do now. Though it took a couple of weeks, the rest of the league is finally catching on to the fact that the Rangers are getting it done to a certain extent with smoke and mirrors -- or should I say Henrik Lundqvist and a ridiculous string of luck in overtime and the shootout.

But every string of luck has to come to an end, something that I'm sure a gambler like Rangers GM Glen Sather understands more or less implicitly. In the standings in the East his team is barely keeping pace with Boston -- a team with four games in hand on New York -- and looks like it could be overtaken any day now by charging teams in Washington or Philadelphia.

In the end, perhaps we ought to thank Sundin. After all, now that he's made up his mind, so many other things in the NHL are going to get unstuck soon enough.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.