I'm fairly certain that there's no way in hell that bad refereeing is single handedly responsible for a 7-2 or 5-0 pair of losses. Until someone compiles and compares a list of total regular season penalty minutes for both teams then I'm going to have to put this one down as angry paranoid ranting by the team, media, and angry fans.
Better reasons for what's happened:
1) 'Nucks and their fans coasted thru the regular season and for some unknown reason thought that the same thing was going to happen in the first two playoff rounds.
2) 'Nucks #1 goalie panicked and has totally lost his composure; apparently this is infectious because the rest of the team and a huge chunk of the fan base both seem to be following him.
3) Everyone's forgetting that the Hawks were last year's champs, and the former champ never goes down easily.
4) I have no idea why, but everyone's certainly forgotten how much that retarded Torres cheap shot on Seabrook genuinely pissed off the Hawks and lit a major fire inside their locker-room; this won't be the first time, or the last one, that a totally unnecessary bit of goonery totally changed the complexion of a series.
As a Flames fan I know exactly what 'Nucks fans are feeling right now. We've blown so many playoff rounds that it's easy to get angry and start tossing out blame everywhere else except for where it belongs. I can still remember back to 1994, when the Flames blew a series lead to Vancouver and were getting penalized every time a Flames player even got within two feet of the Canuck's net. And I can remember 2004 quite well too, where we actually 'won' the Cup in game 6 at home but, thanks to bad calls by Kerry Fraser (the lifelong bane of the Flames and truly the worst NHL referee of all time) and insufficient video replay evidence, Tampa ended up winning everything. It sucks and it hurts but eventually it has to be acknowledged that a great regular season sometimes doesn't mean that a team is ready for the intensity of the playoffs.
BTW, GO 'Nucks GO!