The Two-Line Pass

Don’t forget about the prizes!!! It’s the last day you can win them. Winners will be notified around noon so if you aren’t notified then be funnier next time I have hundreds of dollars worth of prizes to give away, which will be never.

The Lead

Man the Sharks have been drizzling cat turds lately, huh? Oh the laughs we’ve shared.

An overtime loss to the Panthers. They put 39 shots on net and lost 3-2. Hahaha! A 4-2 loss to the Ducks. Dany Heatley goes minus-3. Oh ho ho! An 8-2 loss to Dallas. Evgeni Nabokov and Thomas Greiss stop 23 of 31 shots. Tee hee! A 3-2 loss to Vancouver. Ryan Johnson scores the game-winner for the Canucks. Haw haw! A 4-3 loss to Calgary. Doug Murray finishes minus-4. Loff loff loff! A 5-1 loss to Edmonton. Devan Dubnyk actually gets a win. That’s just pathetic!

And then, for an encore tonight, the Sharks… oh they beat the absolute piss outta Dallas.

Well, it had to happen sometime.

Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t forget about the prizes!!!

The Lead

For those of you unlucky enough to have actually sat through James Cameron’s epic “Avatar,” who then found yourselves additionally luckless to have suffered through tonight’s Ranger game, which was broadcast in 3D, you probably noticed some parallels.

When Avatar begins, there is a single blue speck floating apparently nearer to you than the screen. You can almost touch it. As the hero, whose name I forget, pulls himself from some sort of cryogenic sleep pod and out into the cabin of the ship, the full scope of the movie’s groundbreaking film-making is made apparent. You’re overcome with a definite sense of wonder at what you’re experiencing.

Likewise the first period of the Rangers/Islanders game. The Rangers came out flying, particularly and not surprisingly driven by the Gaborik line, pouring 15 shots on net, getting a little physical and generally outplaying the Islanders. They paid for every mistake they made. For most of the 20 minutes, it looked as though the visitors were standing still while Gaborik picked up a pair of first-period points, and it was 3-0 by the first intermission.

Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t forget about the prizes!!!

The Lead

The Edmonton Oilers have won three straight games.

I’ll say that again: the Edmonton Oilers have won three straight games. Against NHL teams.

And not just any NHL teams either, if that’s what you’re thinking. They’ve beaten the Sharks, Red Wings and now the Canucks. From last Friday until right this very minute, the Oilers have picked up literally 1/8th of their entire win total.

I don’t know why this is happening. Every day, another Oiler seems to come down with some sort of crazy injury — I think I read Andrew Cogliano contracted a case of Fisherman’s Madness or something — and another tragedy, beyond even living in Edmonton, befalls the squad itself. Today’s hysterical mishap saw Devan Dubnyk (who has a girl’s name) get an “infectious gastrointestinal disorder” which in my medical opinion basically means his butt is infected.

Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t forget about the prizes!!!

Thee Lead

October 1, 2009:

Dear Diary,

The NHL season is starting soon and all the so-called “experts” on the internet are trashing my beloved Colorado Avalanche. Sure is going to be an awful year. You remember that Sakic guy? The one who stuck his hand in a snow blower and retired? Yeah, HE RETIRED. Now I can’t think of a single player on the 2001 Avalanche who wasn’t long-time member of the team Ray Bourque (we retired his number!). Anyway because he retired the oldest guy on the team after Milan Hejduk is Chris Stewart and also our starting goalie was the backup on the Panthers like six months ago. Also we have a rookie head coach. And our best player is Wojtek Wolski.

Sincerely,
Some idiot.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

The fans chanted for it. The radio talk show hosts blathered over it. The newspaper reporters wrote about it. The bloggers tweeted about it. The players surely discussed it. Everyone ravened for it.

Revenge.

Bloody, swift revenge. Matt Cooke had to pay for his transgressions against Marc Savard. After all, you don’t rattle another team’s best player’s brain around in his skull without paying for it. Certainly not the way Cooke did it: an unprovoked, deliberate ambush designed to do exactly what it ended up doing.

So no sooner did Cooke hop over the boards for his first shift to a chorus of boos from every corner of the arena than Boston’s resident tough-guy Shawn Thornton asked him to answer for his dastardly deed as though this brand of justice ripped straight from the last 10 pages of every awful black-hat-bad-guy Western would somehow lift the fog that crept into Savard’s brain cavity in the immediate aftermath of last Sunday’s blatant headshot du jour.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

We were given a whole slew of reasons to think the Ducks are the most revolting franchise in the NHL tonight.

As though we needed more.

Tonight, of course, saw James Wisniewski up and run Brent Seabrook, a former teammate, in retaliation for an innocuous hit on Corey Perry who, let’s face it, deserves any hit he takes.

Now, before all you Ducks fans start crying about it being a headshot and boo hoo Corey Perry’s just playin hard out there, let’s keep two things in mind. First, it could only technically a headshot because Perry put his head down around crossbar height (and even then, his arm got in the way of the Seabrook hit) and second, Seabrook had already committed to the hit but Perry turned at the last second and it otherwise would have just been your standard shoulder-to-shoulder check.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

See, there are three kinds of Leafs fans right now and all of them are intolerable and stupid.

The first kind is the one that is ironically going, “LOL LET’S PLAN THE PARADE.”

These people are annoying because everyone on the planet knows the Maple Leafs are still going to finish with a lottery pick. How do they know that, those of you who have been furiously F5ing Lost fansites all week for the latest theory on the smoke monster (he’s a dinosaur made of smoke what’s not to get?) might be asking? Because their second-line center tonight was like John Mitchell or something stupid like that. Have you heard of John Mitchell? I have. He’s the crippled old dude from Lost that is the boss of The Island or something. I don’t know. I barely watch that show. Anywho, yes, the team is crap so you’re calling attention to how crap it is by acting like it’s not crap. We got it.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

I can’t define what it is that unsettles me about this Capitals offense, but I know it when I see it.

Every year, EA’s NHL game has some kind of buggy little hole in its AI programming where as long as you can replicate the way you shoot the puck every time, you can pile up goals at a pace that would make Wayne Gretzky circa 1982 cry like a little baby girl. You remember. Carry it down the wing, cut across the slot at the faceoff circles, backhander. Goal City. Beat your friends 27-1 on five-minute periods. No problem.

Well I don’t know if the rest of the league has figured it out yet, but the Caps have found the way to do it in the actual NHL ‘10.

It’s not that the Capitals shouldn’t be a good team or anything. They should be just about as good as they are from a won-lost perspective. But the way they’re winning these games is just starting to become absurd.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

I remember like two weeks ago or something the Sens fired Eli Wilson, their goalie coach for the previous two seasons. The Sens had just lost five straight and allowed 26 goals in their previous six games, which is of course a crazy-ass number. But people still snickered.

“Fire the goalie coach?!” they scoffed. “Fire the goalies!”

The move was most often compared to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic in such a way that they are all precariously stacked on top of each other before being dropped directly off the back of the ship. A real who-cares move from a floundering franchise desperate to scapegoat someone in no real position of authority.

I get that sentiment.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lead

A couple years ago I apparently signed up for something through the Calgary Flames’ official website because they clearly have my email address on file. Occasionally I’ll get emails about special tickets being put on sale just for people like me a few hours before game day.

I don’t mark them as spam, I don’t look for a link to unsubscribe myself from this list. I sit there and I say, “Oh look another email from the Flames about tickets what a nice organization they sure do care about me even if I’m probably their only sworn American fan within 1,500 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. ” Not that I read these emails beyond the subject line. Again, I’m about 2,200 miles from the Saddledome. These on-sales literally couldn’t matter less to me.

But I guess my point is that I’m a hell of a goddamn Flames fan. I’m such a good fan that I will let them try to sell me crap I don’t want just out of my desire to support them in any way possible.

So fanatical for this team am I that I have, in the past three weeks, watched every single one of their uniformly hideous games.

Read the rest of this entry »