Perks and promises in Mark Messier’s handwritten Canucks contract

Mark Messier was expected to lead the Canucks to new heights when he signed in Vancouver as a free agent. He didn’t.
Instead, Messier’s Canucks missed the playoffs in three straight years before the team bought him out. The fans blamed him for that, and they also blamed him when Trevor Linden, who had ceded the captaincy to the future Hall of Famer, was traded by Mike Keenan to the New York Islanders. And no one liked that he insisted on wearing No. 11, which had been unofficially re