The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

Excuse me, excuse me. What in the world are you thinking? Keith Ballard, I’ve been with you for a lot of years and to see you join up with the likes of these men absolutely makes me sick to my stomach.

The Thrashers may have scored a goal to go up a goal early in what would end up as a 4-3 win over the Florida Panthers, but that wasn’t the big story. The big story was Keith Ballard being the Thrashers’ third man and committing the biggest heel turn in the history of professional hockey here tonight.

First he lets Ilya Kovalchuk go right past him for a breakaway goal and then, while Tomas Vokoun, his now-former friend and teammate, was getting back up, Ballard two-handed him in the face. The bloodied netminder had to be stretchered off the ice and taken by ambulance to a local hospital by EMTs that looked suspiciously like hockey players in EMT uniforms.

Meanwhile Ballard ripped off his Panthers jersey and revealed that he had been a double agent this entire time (and that goes a long way toward explaining his minus-1 rating tonight doesn’t it!?).

The bad news is that Ballard and his new runnin’ buddies will probably interfere in about four NHL games a night, knocking out random teams’ stars and spraypainting a yellow stripe down their back. The good news is that Tomas Vokoun will start appearing in the rafters at these games wearing a long black trenchcoat and wielding a baseball bat in a one-man vigilante mission to right the wrongs committed by Ballard and his pals in the nhlWo.

(Well actually, that’s probably not how it happened at all.)

Elsewhere…

Buffalo 3, Toronto 0

My friend asked me last night to pick the winners of three games so that he could bet on them (legally). I correctly picked Buffalo to win this one, although that’s not really much of an accomplishment I guess. Atlanta was another one of my picks though, and…

Washington 3, Carolina 2

This was the other one. I’m a hockey genius, I think that’s pretty clear here. Oh yeah, and Alex Ovechkin went knee-to-knee on Tim Gleason (albeit unintentionally). He’s gonna have to get suspended now, considering he skated on the Kaleta hit and Laraque just got busted for five over a knee-to-knee last week.

Pittsburgh 5, New York Rangers 2

New Rangers recipe for success: Stop giving up hat tricks to people on the Penguins, especially if that person is not Sid Crosby but rather… Mike Rupp?  Also Gaborik scored twice so that’s 21 freaking goals this year. Holy hell.

Columbus 5, St. Louis 2

Hey, another hat trick. This one by RJ Umberger, who is someone that’s better than Mike Rupp by a decent stretch.

Colorado 3, Tampa Bay 0

Matt Duchene had a pair tonight. Craig Anderson had the shutout. The Bolts had a hell of a bad game.

Detroit 4, Dallas 1

Looks like the Wings busted outta that scoring slump pretty good, eh? Seven goals in their last four periods. Not bad.

Calgary 5, Nashville 0

The Flames have lost one road game in regulation. That was in mid-October. Miikka Kiprusoff hasn’t allowed a goal in a little over two games’ worth of hockey. Jarome Iginla is on some ridiculous scoring pace that I forget what it is now. But it’s sufficiently impressive, believe me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 1:46 am and is filed under Good night. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.