Uprooted from Florida, Canucks goalie Roberto Luongo has found his groove in Vancouver -- and he just might shift the balance in the Western Conference playoffs

	Vancouver Canucks' Roberto Luongo. Jeff Vinnick/Getty Images

By Michael Silver

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.