The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

And you thought the circus wouldn’t be showing up at GM Place for another few weeks when the Olympics came to town and “circus” had the word “media” in front of it.

Saturday night brought us Lasergate, which sounds like some sort of bad Jean-Claude Van Damme straight-to-DVD sci-fi movie, but it was, instead, some Canucks fan attempting to shine a laser pointer into Miikka Kiprusoff’s eyes during play and generally making everyone upset.

It continued tonight, only nobody used any Nikola Tesla-type inventions. Instead, it was the referees who performed in Ring 2 of this particular three-ring fiasco. The entire third period of what had been a good, hard-fought game between the Canucks and Predators, was turned into a joke by Stephane Auger and Dennis LaRuse, who, you may remember, screwed the Red Wings earlier this year.

I thought Alex Burrows, not exactly a guy with a reputation for playing the lily-whitest of games, was getting whistled for some ticky-tack things. Diving. Interference. Unsportsmanlike conduct (minor). Unsportsmanlike conduct (major). The last two were warranted, but the first one for sure wasn’t and the second was, like I said, ticky-tack.

To compound matters, Henrik Sedin was whistled for tripping, legitimately, just 18 seconds after one of the Burrows penalties, and that gave Nashville a 4-on-3 on which they scored the game-winning goal.

It’s really too bad when referees make the games about themselves, but here we are. This has to be the worst officiating crew in the league.

Elsewhere…

Minnesota 4, Pittsburgh 3

Marc-Andre Fleury had a night he’d probably like to forget. He gave up some real bad goals. On the other hand, maybe Minnesota, which has now beaten Chicago and Pittsburgh in consecutive games, is finally getting its crap together after only half a season.

Colorado 3, Calgary 2 (SO)

The Flames really shouldn’t have lost this game. They put 46 shots on Craig Anderson and scored twice. This is the fourth game between these two teams, and Colorado has won all of them 3-2, almost always because Anderson stood on his head.

San Jose 2, Los Angeles 1

Much better defense from the Sharks tonight. But this game wouldn’t have been lost if they’d played AMERICAN goaltender Jon Quick. (Or was that supposed to be from last week?)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 3:17 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.