Canucks announce starting goaltender Jacob Markstrom is taking a “leave of absence.”

The Vancouver Canucks have a lot of reasons to be excited about the 2019 - 2020 National Hockey League regular season but it now sounds like they have hit their first big bump in the road, and through no fault of their own no less. 

On Monday morning the Canucks made a rather surprising announcement when they revealed that their starting goaltender Jacob Markstrom would be stepping away from the rea, for a short period of time. Now you can speculate on the reason behind this absence from Markstrom all you want but the Canucks have only stated that Markstrom absence from the team is the result of a personal family matter

From the Canucks official statement:

"Jacob Markstrom has been granted a leave of absence to attend to a family matter and is expected to rejoin the Canucks on the road this weekend, said Canucks general manager Jim Benning. "Respectfully, we will not offer any further comment."

Obviously the hope is that everything is going just fine in Markstrom personal life, and to the credit of all the Canucks fans out there the response has been one of overwhelming support. It is not that the fans in Vancouver are not upset at being down a very important player this week, but merely that they recognize that some things are much bigger than the sport of hockey in the grand scheme of things. 

We wish Markstrom nothing but the best, and hope he makes a speedy return back to the Canucks net.