I suppose, if I had power over these things, that I would have picked a different game to honor Steve Yzerman and Dan Cleary to score goal 100. One where the Red Wings didn't lose 5-1, and go down another forward because Jason Williams broke his leg.
If I were a better blogger, I would have diligently watched the game with my eyes glued to the screen so that I could break down the Wings' play period by period and explain to you exactly what went wrong, but around the third goal against my team, I usually start to zone out and hope that if I just don't look at it directly, it isn't really happening. Like if I don't watch the end of the game or check the scores online, the Red Wings won't have lost. They won't have won, but they'll never have lost. The more games go sour, the more I have this urge, and the more I have this urge, the more I'm convinced that Schrodinger was a hockey fan.
If you put a gun to my head and told my to think of something positive, I'd beg you to pull the trigger say that at least I got a good giggle out of watching Jonas Gustavsson stand next to Ted Lindsay and Johnny Bower to accept his player of the game award, because of how outlandishly tall he looked next to them.
And I'd make a bet on the next forward to get injured but the last time I bet on player injuries, I won five dollars and Andreas Lilja still isn't back in the lineup.
That's not even the worst game the Red Wings have played in the last year. Why does it feel like it was the epitome of gross, and the end of the world besides?
Well that was exhilarating. But it was by no means perfect. The Wings had some bad turnovers in the first two periods, there were defensive brain lapses, and countless shots on a practically empty goal never found the back of the net. Thankfully, none of that mattered in the end and they were able to snap the Shark's 5-0 record after scoring the first goal and 6 game winning streak. The Triple Deke has a pretty solid three stars selection that I couldn't have put better myself. And it was good to see the Eurotwins remember how to score in the shootout. Those dekes were glorious.
And while I don't necessarily love the idea of having the winner of 65 minutes of NHL hockey be decided by how good a team's goaltender and top three scorers are, I have a small place in my heart for shootouts. Don't get me wrong; I wish every Wings game ended with Darren Helm getting a hat trick and a shutout for our goalie, but there is just something about them I really like. Maybe it's because I get to see Pavel and Hank do this:
But more than likely it's because of the IHL. When I was still an impressionable young child, my family attended a lot of DetroitVipers games. The bulk of the memories I have from this team consist of the suites at the Palace, cotton candy, Vipe-bear, and shootouts followed by confetti. More than likely, I'm combining two memories with the shootouts and confetti, but because they're particularly happy memories, the idea of a shootout brings me warm, happy feelings in the midst of the bleakness of being third in the division behind Chicago and Colombus (thankfully, we're only one game behind them).
Overall I'm happy. The Wings played a pretty solid game and if they can keep it at this level or maybe even push it a little more, I'll stay happy. I can actually see the team's confidence growing and it's giving me hope for the future. The Wings are missing a handful of their top/breakout players and are still managing to find wins even though the roster is filled out with players that would normally be scratched or shipped back over to the west side of the state with me. I have hope.
I know I'm two days late on this, but wow, was Tuesday ever a game. I mean, sure, there were still more turnovers than I like seeing, and the Wings got lucky on... every bounce the puck made all night, but after a 2-0 game that looked like the Red Wings were finally starting to turn on the awesome-juice and gel together as a team (it's only been, what, a month now?), I don't know if I can complain.
Should I? I spent pretty much the entire first month of the season optimistic and hopeful. My team was awful.
Once I gave up on them, and life, and finally started to bitch about how awful they were playing, it took them all of two days to pull their act together.
So with that in mind, I don't think we'll ever make the playoffs if we keep playing like this. This is terrible. Worst team in the league. Where's our defense? Evgeni Nabokov's probably going to get a hat trick tonight and I'll weep in the darkness of my empty room.
Game Day Randoms: Tonight the Wings play San Jose at home at 7:30pm. All of the defensemen have successfully fought off the flu and should be back in the lineup tonight. Speaking of defensemen, Lilja is finally starting to make some progress on the headaches, but still has no idea when he'll be back. Brad May is still out thanks to Jason Williams and his crazy stick ending up in May's eye. Khan has the potential lines here, but with Mike Babcock coaching, you'd be crazy to take them as the truth. I'd bet that by the end of the night he has Zetterberg playing with Gordie Howe and Kid Rock. Now that's a line I'd pay good money to see.
Tonight there's a game against Boston. I'm not sure I have much to say about it, except to note that the team needs the points (I think we're 11th place out of 15 in the conference right now. I think, if I have any grasp on the sport at all, that we need to aim for at least 8th. Right? I'm not hallucinating that, am I?) and to spend another ten pages bitching about how much I hate Versus.
Which I should really stop. Granted, there's a lot to bitch about. There's no denying that. Especially in these trying times, where, if I have to watch my team lose consistently, I want everybody on the channel I'm watching it on, from the regional producers down to the lowliest interns to at least pretend to be ragingly unfair, completely biased homers. It just makes it easier when you feel like the color guy might be hurting right along with you.
But I feel like I've been too hard on Versus in the past. At least they're trying. At least they're a nationally broadcast cable network in the States airing hockey games across the country on a regular basis. Sure, they're not perfect. Sure, their commentators don't always kiss the ground that Ken Holland walks on like I think they should. Sure, Brian Engblom's hair looks like he scalped MacGyver and then decided to wear his mullet as a trophy headpiece but MacGyver's head was a little smaller than his so the mullet didn't quite fit right so he had to put it on little mullet stilts on his head so it would stay there*.
(*MacGyver's mullet wouldn't stay there. MacGyver's mullet would steal three paperclips and Kieth Jone's pen and use them to escape.)
But at least they're not NBC, who forbids teams from holding playoff viewing parties, makes us spend every intermission hoping Mike Milbury will finally just kick Pierre MaGuire's ass but he never does, and has a disconcerting anti-Swede bias, which I wouldn't even mind if my team didn't have more Swedes than Ikea had chairs, but it does, so I do mind, quite a bit.
I'm sorry, I'm sitting here rationalizing the legitimacy of the existence of Versus, where I should be doing my job - which is making myself feel better about a potential loss tonight by making fun of the Boston Bruins.
Sadly, all I have to give you is this video of some bears playing hockey:
I don't remember if we'd already posted this. Aside from the obvious ethical PETA/ASPCA questions I have... I just want to know how much fish paste and tranquilizer you have to use to teach bears to skate.
Probably more fish paste than it took to get Zdeno Chara to strip naked in front of a camera. (Don't worry, it's... tastefully... posed...) The good news about that picture is that if it struck you blind, you don't have to see Brian Engblom's hair at all tonight. Awesome!
Alright, before I completely geek out about everything that was awesome about yesterday, let's recap the holy-crap-not-so-awesome:
- Jonathan Ericsson appears to have caught the flu. Thanks bunches, Edmonton. - Jason Williams tried to take Brad May's eye out last night; he should be fine, but that was a little scary, and logistically, we don't need another man down. - Not a single kid showed up to my front door as a Red Wing last night. Back before I went to college, Halloween was good for a solid McCarty or Shanahan and two Yzermen, at least. How disappointing. There were a couple Tigers, but it's just not the same. - Filppula still has a broken wrist, Franzen still has a gimpy knee, and yo mamma so ugly, she on long-term IR cause the coach don't wanna look at her.
But hey, the AWESOME:
- The Red Wings won a game! And more than that, they won a game where they didn't blow a lead, didn't have to switch goalies mid-way to wake the team up, and were, for the most part, defensively responsible. To quote probably the entire rest of the internet, they looked like the Red Wings again out there. (I don't think they ever stopped looking like the Red Wings though. The organization's been around for more than 8 decades. They still looked like the Red Wings last week. Just... maybe the Red Wings of the 1970s or something.)
- It's really nice to see Brad Stuart score on a team that isn't the Red Wings. You have to understand, I like the guy. But did he realize last spring that Lilja was going to be out for a while, and took it upon himself to unleash a string of did-he-really-do-that? so long that he would take up the responsibility of fan scapegoat? Because that's what it's been looking like. Not last night though. Last night earned him back his spot in the middle of the popular kids at the cool table in the lunch room.
To the ancient Celts, Halloween was the start of the new year, a time to chase away the ghosts of the past year (literally and figuratively) and turn over a new leaf. Are the Red Wings living out this tradition and finally finding their way as a team? Or was last night just a shining bright light of greatness amid what will turn out to be a dark season of fluky injuries, heartbreak, and inconsistent play?
That's an awful thought. Let's hope for the former.
Wouldn't that be perfect if we were playing the BJs tonight? Unfortunately, I don't have any Flames in costume, and the only Red Wings-related Halloween picture I can find is wildly inappropriate:
And that's where we stand, before a team that's not afraid of blood, already injury-ravaged, desperately, desperately in need of a win.
I mean it's starting to get ridiculous. I know Babcock's been saying that regardless of the record, this team's been playing better than the blowing-through-the-league teams of th elast couple years, but is that any consolations? Isn't it the most cliched-yet-true saying in all of hockey - good teams find ways to win? I know it's only the end of October, but right now the Wings have not-won more games than they have won, and I'm kind of expecting to see people start to leap from the bandwagon as though it had been set aflame.
Speaking of which, I know what the Red Wings can go as for Halloween.
We'd like to be able to say something profoundly intelligent about the way the Red Wings played that game in Vancouver, but Trisha was on painkillers at the time, and I was half asleep in a post-midterm haze. And no, neither made the dark, sad portions of the first period any easier to watch, I'm sorry to say.
But it did look like Jimmy Howard had the goddamned game of his life out there. I only wish it didn't take pulling Ozzie to wake the team up (and hopefully pulling Ozzie woke up Ozzie). That was probably the most intense October game I've ever seen. Again, maybe it was the three hours of sleep and the painkillers, but if it could keep us both conscious until 1 a.m., then it had to be pretty good.
Today the Wings are in Edmonton for the second to last game of the road trip, and the world is freaking out about the Swine Flu. I know it's kind of a big deal, but I don't think Gary will have a repeat of 1918 until Sidney Crosby is on a respirator. Still, all the hype (and continued lack of sleep) is giving me trippy mental images of Piet Van Zant's daily lectures about the proper use of hand sanitizer and I somehow imagine the whole team walking around like this:
It looks like the freaking zombie apocalypse. Be careful not to get Swine Flu, Kronner. We can't afford to lose anyone else at this point.
Tonight the Red Wings face off against the Canucks. Here's to hoping that Samuelsson remembers how to not hit the net and the Wings can come out of this road trip with at least a tiny spark of happiness.
Here are the projected lines courtesy of George Malik over at MLive.
"Datsyuk-Zetterberg-Holmstrom Cleary-Filppula-Bertuzzi (Eaves working in) Leino-Draper-Williams May-Helm-Maltby (Abdelkader working in)
The defense remained the same: Lidstrom-Kronwall Stuart-Rafalski Ericsson-Lebda (Meech working in)
Osgood (starting) Howard"
The top line is still intact, so I'm happy (and maybe tonight they'll actually score a goal that isn't a Nick Lidstrom slapshot that was deflected into the net off Homer's ass...although I'll take that).
And just for fun, here's a little flashback to one of the funnier moments in Wings-Canucks history. There is no better scrum than one that is sparked by a potato based insult.
That was so awful that I might want to go crawl in a little hole right now and never come out again.
And I didn't even watch more than ten minutes of it.
All of those ten minutes were in the Huntington Club at Van Andel Arena during a Griffins signing after a game that thankfully they won. It's not a huge consolation, but a consolation nonetheless. I'll take what I can get.
This game probably makes us the last two people on the entire internet that don't want to tar and feather Jimmy Howard out of town and deal for Luongo at the trade deadline. According to our mother (who, understand, loved how Hasek played and still has a crush on Manny Legace, so take her opinion with that in mind), Jimmy actually had a good game tonight, but a good game is secondary to a team loss. I still have faith in him. I don't know why. I don't actually have anything to back up my lack of desire to throw him under the proverbial bus. Call it a gut feeling. Call it wishful thinking. Call it having delusions. I'm still behind our backup goalie. I just wish the team was, too.
The Wings are just getting all their losses out of the way now, right? So maybe they won't have any stretches later like February from two years ago, or that weekend where the entire central division scored 8 goals a game on them, right?
Trisha and Lindsay still don't know what they're doing on the internet. Lindsay currently attends Grand Valley State University, FSN broadcaster John Keating's alma mater. Trisha is a recent GV graduate currently undergoing treatment for her uncontrollable addiction to adjectives. There might have been a time when they were not Red Wings fans, but neither of them have any memories of the womb.
