Hockeytown Static

WTF Wednesday

2011-05-04T14:29:00.003-04:00

I'll be honest, so far the playoffs have felt like a bad case of deja vu. A really bad case. Not like the kind where you think you can predict the future for twenty seconds, but the kind where you wake up and it's still Groundhog Day. I haven't wanted to write about them. I haven't really wanted to read about them on other blogs.

The Wings have done their best this season when they've been cornered, so I'm still remaining hopeful for tonight's game and the entire series, but even if the team pulls out some kind of spectacular concerted awesomeness, our best case scenario still leaves the Wings down 2-1 in the series. That's pretty pukey.

Last year I routed a little of my misery into pointing and laughing at the utter ridiculousness that is the San Jose Sharks, and a few of you seemed to appreciate it. So in the hope that laughter will provide catharsis again, I give you the Sharks Christmas Album:

Joe Thornton. How can you dance that bad? How is that possible?

We're still back

2011-04-13T13:58:00.004-04:00

If you pay attention to this blog at all, you may have noticed that it's been hit with a bad case of writer's block. I wanted to break out of this by coming up with a totally awesome first round playoff preview, but then I realized the Wings were playing the Coyotes in the first round again, and I'd already put six hours into doing that once before, and really, really did not want to do it again.

So in these last few hours before opening faceoff, while you're boiling your octopi, setting up your shrines, and preparing your voodoo effigies of Shane Doan and Keith Yandle, I'll say a little something about playoff superstitions.

One of my favorite stories in the realm of hockey lore is that when Red Kelly was coaching the Maple Leafs in 1976, he used Pyramid Power to try to help them get through the playoffs.

yeah, seriously, he did this

He had pyramids underneath the bench during games. He had one in the locker room that Darryl Sittler (also a proponent of lucky ties) kept his sticks under. It only got the team to game 7 in the second round, and it was probably more the distraction of the gimmick than actual ancient Egyptian metaphysics that the Leafs were benefiting from, but at least it helped distract them from then-owner Harold Ballard and his craziness.

Plus, I've done some way weirder stuff than Pyramid Power to appease the hockey gods. Things involving magical sunglasses and hockey cards in my freezer.

Fan culture is a weird thing, and it makes people do weird things. Rationally, I know that changing my clothes in the middle of a hockey game taking place on the other side of the country is really unlikely to have any effect on the game itself, but I keep the lucky shirt on anyway. Why? Because then if they win, I can feel like I was part of it. If they lose, I can absolve myself of any blame; I did everything I could. And at a time when my fragile emotional state is being controlled by people I never met and the unpredictable bounce of a three-ounce chunk of vulcanized rubber, it tricks my brain into thinking I have some kind of control over the situation so I don't completely lose my mind and end up in an institution.

Also, my lucky shirt's got a record of like 12-3-4 this season, so it might actually be lucky.

Although, right now I'm weighing it's perceived luckiness against how much I don't want to get vomit all over it when I spend the entire game puking.

Hey, we're back

2011-03-09T23:05:00.002-05:00

We know we've been gone for what it internet time accounts for something like four years. I'm sure you all felt the void in your hearts, even if you didn't know what it was. That empty feeling you've had for the last month and a half? That's you not being exposed to bad music or MS Paint jobs.

No, we're kidding. it took our own mother until three days ago to realize we'd been gone; we can only imagine how little the rest of the internet cares. We plan to continue throwing bad music and MS Paints at you regardless.

Today's loss against the Kings was especially painful after Saturday's loss against the Coyotes. It highlighted a lot of the issues that, had this blog been writing about the Red Wings over the last few weeks, would have been touched on in this blog over the last few weeks - the defense has been a little shaky lately (Ericsson's the second-best statistically right now - and no, Lidstrom's not the guy ahead of him), the offense hasn't been producing like it needs to be, and the goaltending's been... well, at least we have Jimmy.

Granted, to miss the playoffs at this point, the whole team would pretty much have to stage a protest and just sit down on the ice and start playing Hungry Hungry Hippos for the rest of the season, but still. The Wings need to get it in gear. They've got a week of games against the Blackhawks next month, followed by god only knows what in the playoffs. Sadness, if they go in playing like this.

I don't know if there's anything I can do to ease any of the pain of tonight's loss - even though it's technically Wednesday, the best wtf-ery I have pertaining to the Kings is Anze Kopitar's baby pictures.

But all these seem to do for me is lead into an unfortunate paradox. Nothing this adorable should be allowed to score on the Red Wings, end of story.

I didn't lead into the post with the promise of pantsless pictures of Slovenians, but maybe I should have.

What kind of animal is that rug made from???

The Red Wing

2011-01-17T21:44:00.005-05:00

As follow-up to last week's WTF Wednesday, here's the Red Wings portion of the Guardian Project:

While he was already being called an affront to the holy institution of the Winged Wheel an hour before he was posted to the Guardian Project facebook page, I have to say that, considering what we've already seen, he could have been worse. I mean, granted, it seems a little superfluous that he have jet engines, legs, and some kind of knee-mounted, pop-and-lock Segway device, but I'm hearing from some sources that he also shoots lasers, which I guess is kind of cool. "Automotive empath" makes it sound like he can read cars' minds, which I'm hoping is accomplished by doing some Vulcan mind meld-like hand movements and a lot of grunting, because that would be hilarious.

Here he is in action:

... sort of.

I'm having a problem here though. What are they going to do with them? There's 30 of them altogether. That's a lot of character development (though not enough character development to keep them from ALL BEING SOME KIND OF PSYCHIC) to have a one-shot publicity dump at the All-Star game (which we all know is always watched by all hockey fans (I need a font to denote sarcasm.)) and then just drop them completely. And 30 characters seems like an awful lot of character interaction for a comic book. I'm worried the NHL is going to be using them in some weird official capacity, but for what, I can't say.

I don't know. Some news brief might have already covered this, but the internet is no longer dial-up compatible, and I can't run to a coffee shop every time I want to spend five minutes googling something at two in the morning, so for now this blog can only speculate.

At any rate, Segway-Starscream-Speed Racer up there is definitely not the weirdest thing to have worn the winged wheel.

No, not by far.

WTF Wednesday

2011-01-12T16:13:00.005-05:00

As you all probably know by now, the NHL is going comical.

Now when I first heard of this, my concern was what they would concoct for the Red Wings. My mind immediately went to an image of an old man who can fly, is a Transformer, and has a pistol that shoots Little Caesar's Pizza.

I would buy this action figure in a heartbeat.

Now those of you who have naive, optimistic minds might be thinking this is crazy talk - that certainly the great Stan Lee, the father of the entire Marvel Comics franchise would be able to put together a character creation team that could come up with 30 unique, original, and non-crazy ideas. And if you want to keep thinking that, you should exit this blog immediately, because after seeing the ridiculousness that they came up with for the teams released so far, I think old Optimus Ted up there is going to hit well below the WTF-ery mark that Marvel is about to set.

So far 12 of the 30 superheroes have been revealed and they... well, you really just have to see them for yourselves.

The King looks prissy and like he would cry if he broke a nail (maybe it's the ponytail). The Oiler is clearly on steroids. The Hurricane looks like Genie Jafar, and I'm pretty sure that The Devil is just a horse. And they really spared no expense when inventing the Guardian's powers. Nothing says superhero like The Predator's "matter ingestion" or The Wild's "general mayhem" (I've got a two year old cousin who does both of those quite well).

My favorite so far is The Flyer:

A "granite chin"? Ok, I know what they mean by that, but I'm still getting the mental image of Bobby Clarke's head being used as a curling stone. (And sorry, no - you're not getting an MS Paint of that. I have to have this posted before midnight.)

This assessment of the project sounds a little scathing, I know, but there is honestly nothing this blog loves more than something hockey related that's so crazy it makes you question the laws of the universe.

It looks like the Guardian Project is going to answer all Hockeytown Static's secret wtf hopes and dreams.

Crosvechkin

2011-01-05T23:47:00.000-05:00

One thing that everyone learns about me pretty quickly once the conversation has breached the subject of hockey is that one of the things I hate the most about he NHL is the Gary Bettman-fueled three-ring circus extravaganza of Crosby/Ovechkin. Not the players themselves, but the Gary Bettman-fueled three-ring circus. I've gone so far as to personify this media-entity as a living thing and have written numerous letters to my representatives in Congress asking why Crosvechkin has yet to be put on the list of known terrorists to be hunted down and shot.

oh god what have i done

But there's a reason I like to pay attention to the Winter Classic (and not just because I secretly think having a game outside is awesome enough to counteract my distaste toward any team that might be playing (even Crosvechkin)) - it's because the game itself seems to have fallen under some sort of gypsy curse. I'm not talking about the weather or the ice conditions (which, admittedly, have been hilarious), I'm talking about this:

Lost in the 2008 Stanley Cup Finals

Lost in the 2009 Stanley Cup Finals

Lost in the 2010 Stanley Cup Finals

So since both the Capitals and the Penguins are eastern conference teams, that leaves things wide open for a western conference candidate.

And I don't want to jinx anything, but the last two years have seen a prior Winter Classic participant be the one to carry out the curse on that year's team in the finals.

Now, could all this superstitious what-have-you simply be the result of the NHL just being good at choosing teams to participate in the Winter Classic, teams that are good enough to make it to the conference finals and beyond for a couple years surrounding their outdoor game debut?

Yes. But I have nothing of merit to say about the last three games the Wings played, and frankly just wanted to have an excuse to post Crosvechkin, which I worked on in MS Paint for three straight days.

HATTRICK EAVES!!!

2010-12-29T23:01:00.005-05:00

This is the first time you've seen a post on this blog within six hours of a game since... probably since Trisha got out of college. There are two reasons for this:

1. This game was a circus festival of awesomosity.

Patrick Eaves scored a freaking hat trick. I was pretty much expecting him to get the puck on his stick three feet from the empty net, with no one between him and it but air, and then go diving into the corner, but I'm glad he didn't. CURLY. FRIES.
Babcock dropped the f-bomb on camera. Loud enough for the audio to pick it up.
The Wings are now the top of the league. Where they should be.

2. I was already on the internet. This might be something some of you take for granted, but in our house, we have a dial-up connection, and we only have it on one computer. We have to schedule in a good five or ten minutes just to sign on and get our own blog loaded. And I don't normally go online during hockey games at home.

But today, there was something funky going on with the feed or the cameras - it looked like we were watching the game with frames missing. The game was back and forth enough that it was starting to make me ill, so instead of watching the Red Wings score seven goals, I listened to them doing it while I trolled auction sites for old pictures. Which means that not only do we have this timely (though short) post, but also the WHL trading card gallery of Horrible Hair:

Happy Wednesday.

So this has not only been a really great night for me personally, but also a highly productive one.

The Greatest Hockey Music Ever - Part V

2010-12-24T00:37:00.006-05:00

I love Chris Osgood, so we're not discussing tonight's game right now. Instead, here's a little bit of holiday cheer for you to annoy your relatives with. It also happens to be one of my favorite Christmas songs. What that says about me... I'm not sure.

Johnny Bower is a certified badass. He won four Stanley Cups, two Vezina trophies, played all but a scant handful of his 552 games maskless, and when he was in high school, he successfully lied about his age to go overseas and start shooting Nazis.

No, really, I'm still young enough to serve...

He will always be cooler than you are. Only adding to this fact is his 1965 #29 hit on the Canadian charts:

Honky the Christmas Goose.

Recorded by Bower, his son “Little John”, and a choir of children (The Rinky-Dinks), this might just be the single greatest Christmas song in existence. The song tells the harrowing personal journey of Honky, who “got so fat that he was no use” (it never says how. Maybe he was a farm goose being fattened up for holiday dinner. This is already uplifting). Depressed about his bourgeoning weight, Honky begins to take out his frustrations by scaring the bejesus out of unsuspecting townsfolk. Tired of being chased down icy sidewalks by a mutantly rotund, out of control water fowl, holiday purchases scattering to the wind, ~~the townsfolk roast and eat him with cranberry sauce and a walnut dressing~~ Santa Claus rescues him because Rudolf is a useless, cross-eyed idiot who keeps running into Boeing jets.

HUR DUR...

I like this song because it shows us how fat people, like Honky and Santa Claus, can still contribute to society. So don’t worry about all that Christmas pie you’re eating, kids. Johnny Bower says it’s ok to be a porker.

And he knows how to get the ladies

Should you now wish to translate your new favorite song into a last-minute holiday gift, this site sells CD cases.

A Johnny Bower CD comes with the purchase of the case, but you're not actually ordering the CD. You're just ordering the case.

Stay classy, Chicago

2010-12-18T00:03:00.003-05:00

The Wings won a game and it was awesome, and then they lost tonight's game and it was gross. I've got something more important to write about.

I can understand, and maybe even accept the "Detroit sucks" chants. That particular phrase has a long history of being chanted by the fans of the Wings' biggest rivals, and if I'm going to get all up in arms about it tonight, I'll have to write out retroactive diatribes on a quarter of the teams in the league.

What I'm upset about is what they did to Chelios.

He put on a Blackhawks jersey, stood up on a Blackhawks ice, in front of God and everybody, professing his Chicago-ness and his love for his hometown team, the team he spent nearly a decade with, and they booed him.

He was expecting it. He was planning for it. He said "let's let bygones be bygones" and waited for it to stop. It kept on. It got louder.

I joke a lot about Chicago fans being unclassy jerks, but I didn't think this was very funny. This went beyond unclassy. I'd actually like to hear what Mickey Redmond was saying about it off-camera, but Redmond's a gentleman and I'm a girl, so I doubt I'd get to hear it from him anyway.

What basis do I have to say this was unclassy? Let's take a look at what classy looks like:

Last November, Lindsay and I were at a Wings game right in the middle of the vomitrocious stretch of three games (two back to back at home) where Detroit was held scoreless. Joe Louis Arena was hosting the Atlanta Thrashers. The crowd was silent when Slava Kozlov scored, but when Budd Lynch announced the goal over the loudspeaker, we clapped for him, because he was one of ours.
I don't actually remember whether Wings fans booed Marian Hossa for going to the Blackhawks last season, but I don't remember them doing it. What I do remember was a thread on message board about whether booing was or was not appropriate in that situation, and the posters who yelled at the pro-booing individuals for unclassiness.
Remember Bob Probert? He didn't end his career with Detroit. In fact, he spend quite a few years throwing punches as a member of the Chicago Blackhawks. But after he retired, if someone at Joe Louis Arena had tried to boo him? The guy next to him would have knocked his lights out. So probably would have Probert.
This a a hockey blog, so I don't know how many of you even care about basketball, but there's some crossover with the Wings and Pistons fanbases, so I'm counting this as relevant for the sake of this argument. Chauncey Billups of the Detroit Pistons was traded to another team. His first game back at the Palace? The fans gave him a lengthy standing ovation.

We weren't all butterflies and roses to Fedorov the first few times he skated on Detroit ice someone else's jersey, but now I want him to come back for a ceremony at the Joe so the crowd can not boo him and I can add him to this list.

This isn't even about Wings fans being un-realistically classy. Trevor Linden was the heart and soul of the Vncouver Cnaucks; he wore the C, he gave them his best, and then he left. Vanouver didn't boo him in an Islanders jersey. They held up signs saying "Always a Canuck", and "Captain in our hearts". Earlier this season, when Modano, as a Red Wing,went back out on Dallas ice, the fans (and this is a crowd that at the end of the 2008 western conference finals chanted "Let's go Penguins" as the Red Wings awaited the presentation of the Campbell Bowl) didn't boo him. He was the heart and soul of the Dallas Stars, he wore the C, and the fans gave him the cheers he deserved.

Well, Chelios was the heart and soul of the Chicago Blackhawks. He was a hometown boy, one of their own, a fan of the team growing up, and he gave them the best years of his career. The Chicago River flows backwards through his veins. If you cut him, he'd bleed vaguely racist feathers and deep dish pizza (and then you'd be bleeding for making him bleed his own blood). But Chicago didn't care about that tonight -- they seemed much more interested in hurrying things along to screaming through the national anthem and singing the chorus of Chelsea Dagger on perpetual repeat. Chicago didn't care that he was out there on their ice, wearing their sweater, trying to talk about what an honor it was to have played for their organization -- he had been a Red Wing once, and I guess for them hating another team is more important than caring about your own.

By the third period. there were some fans in attendance attempting to turn the tide of the chanting from "Detroit Sucks' to Let's go Hawks"resulting in what sounded like "We Want Socks" (which everyone in my household found incredibly humorous). If those were the real fans, the ones who recognize what Chelios gave their organization and appreciated him for it, then my heart goes out to them. Maybe someday their compatriots will realize that there's more to being a Blackhawks fan than hating the Red Wings.

Loopholes, awesomness, and a little hockey karma

2010-12-13T02:14:00.000-05:00

First of all, for the benefit of Lindsay, who I know won't stop pestering me about this until we're in our fifties unless I clear it up right away - when I said I'd write something about every game, I never said how soon after the game the writing would come. At any rate, I have a solid excuse for yesterday - the power went out due to a snow storm, and I spent most of the evening reading comic books by kerosene lamp (no joke - my dad collects them. Our house is brighter during blackouts than any other situation). So here's my make-up work:

To say that I wasn't expecting that game against Montreal would be the truth. It was preceded by a full hour of black and white footage breaking down a rivalry that had already been running full steam a good 300 years before the dinosaurs were water-skiing behind Noah's Ark.

Ted Lindsay angry. TED LINDSAY SMASH!

Is it telling of what time and separate conferences do to a rivalry that they had to go back to the pre-color days to get most of their footage? Probably. But that's sort of beside the point. CBC had this game so hyped up that they pushed Hockey Night In Canada ahead one day to give it national coverage. It seemed just about the perfect opportunity for the Wings to all eat giant, steaming bowls of stupid that morning and herp derp their way through another abysmal loss. They didn't. They won, and it was awesome.

So I was expecting some sort of karmic retribution on Saturday against the Devils - because the day before had been so awesome, because Chris Osgood was in net and there are clearly otherworldly forces conspiring against his surpassing 400 career wins, because I've trained myself to consistently expect the worst - but the worst thing that happened all night was that every goal and fight in the game happened while I was out of the room. Well actually I guess the worst things that happened all night happened to the Devils.

It's a reassuring thought, Santa

And then the Kings were in Detroit this evening.

With about sixteen left to play in the third, I wondered whether it would make me a bad Wings fan to abandon my television before the game was over to take a shower, but then I decided that personal hygiene is more important than subjecting myself to needless pain, and anyway, as Lindsay was quick to remind me, the game had been over since the middle of the second period.

If I had a dollar for of every picture I've saved of Brad Stuart and Jimmy Howard lying side by side, watching their tears freeze to the ice, I'd have enough to go out and buy a nice-looking scrapbook to keep them in.

This is the part where to make myself feel better about my team having lost, I usually post something like Jack Johnson playing baseball with Sidney Crosby, or Anze Kopitar's naked baby pictures, but my heart's not really in it tonight, which I think has less to do with bitterness over the loss and more to do with the fact that I'm falling asleep at my keyboard right now. Oh well. Maybe next game.

Go Wings.

"WTF Thursday" just doesn't have the same ring to it

2010-12-09T12:00:00.004-05:00

Ok, nobody can blame me if I don't want to write about last night's game. I wouldn't blame anyone if they didn't want to read about it.

I don't know why I'm surprised every time the Red Wings have a miserable night against the Nashville Predators - it happens nearly every time, even when they eventually come out on top. I guess in some respects I should cut my losses - I didn't have to sit through two and a half periods with the game tied at zero, and, to my knowledge, none of the Red Wings skated off with a concussion that's going to last a year.

Uh, did I sort of promise a Nashville-themed WTF Wednesday and then totally not deliver?

I wish I could bring you something awesome to make up for that (and maybe some of you will find this way more awesomely wtf than I do - I've been hoarding so much hockey-related strangeness on my hard drive the last few years that I'm starting to get a warped view of what's weird and what's actually normal), but all I have is a reader-provided youtube of Taylor Swift plugging the team (even though we've got some sketchy evidence that she might actually back the Penguins) and this poorly done tattoo:

This should slightly upset me as a Red Wings fan, but instead I'm just laughing

Maybe I'd have more if I had the tolerance to research them better, but every time I think about that team, all my brain screams is "vomit vomit train whistles".

That was unpleasant

2010-12-06T22:28:00.006-05:00

This blog has gotten some serious writer's block. Take a look at the difference between the post count from 2009 and what we're at so far in 2010, and you'll understand what I mean. As someone who managed to trick a college into letting her actually graduate with a writing degree, I know that the best cure for writer's block is ~~copious amounts of alcohol, lack of sleep, and unlimited high speed internet~~ writing through it even when you have nothing whatsoever to say, which is why for the next two weeks, I'm saying something about every game the Red Wings play, even if it's just three sentences about how [insert team name here] makes me want to throw my fist through a wall.

And judging how stress levels at my new job have been, there's going to be a lot of that.

I can't say I don't wish the Wings would have won that game, but maybe they need to lose a couple every once in a while to remind them to play a full 60 minutes, and I have to say that it's really, really nice after last season for a regulation loss to be a relatively rare occurrence.

I still don't know what was going on with Bertuzzi's no-goal, but whatever. I'm pretty sure I had my eyes closed for that entire replay, because I didn't see any reason to blow the whistle, and last I checked, refs weren't allowed to just arbitrarily stop play. Maybe he had a wedgie in his Toasty Tights and wanted a couple minutes to re-adjust.

I'll leave you with that mental image. Speaking of which - the next game's on Wednesday. I'll have to check and see if I have any Nashville-related wtf-ery lying around.

The Greatest Hockey Music Ever - Part IV

2010-11-27T00:39:00.003-05:00

So from what we heard, that game tonight was pretty epic. Unfortunately, as we weren't around to see it, we don't really feel qualified to offer up our opinions, so here's something actually relevant to what we were doing that might entertain you.

In honor of the Great Big Sea concert we just attended, here's the consummate sleeping-your-way-around-the-league song, Helmethead:

Great Big Sea - Helmethead

I'd like to be able to give this one another five paragraph analyzation, but unfortunately (fortunately?) it's sung completely in tune, and lacks both horrific lyrics and a synth solo breakdown.

Enjoy.

My throat still hurts from yelling

2010-11-22T17:15:00.002-05:00

I'd like to bitch and moan about sloppy, inconsistent play right now, but I have a feeling that most of my complaints are just me taking out my unrelated frustrations (it's Monday morning right now, and I'm sacrificing my lunch hour (and risking the very real possibility that someone will walk by and yell at me for not working because they don't know I'm on lunch) to go through and edit this post for spelling errors and comma mistakes (of which there will still probably be three)) on whatever is most readily available, and since I don't have any way of watching the Blackhawks right now (SOMETIMES I TAKE OUT MY IRRATIONAL ANGER BY YELLING AT THAT TEAM FOR NO REASON, ALRIGHT?), it's all getting dumped on bad turnovers and powerplays where the Red Wings have no shots on goal.

Oh my god, last night the Red Wings had a powerplay where there were no shots on goal.

Why?

No, no I'm dwelling on the negative again. At the end of the story, however dismally you want to spin it, the Red Wings won.

And I have to tell you - if they're going to use less-than-stellar play to set up dramatic turnarounds as exciting as last night was, fine. They have my blessing. I can watch Zetterberg and Lidstrom score ridiculous, game-changing goals like that every hour of every day for the rest of my life. More please.

Even though every member of the team left the ice limping, somehow no one got substantially injured. So you can all loosen the knot in your stomach and prepare it for copious amounts of turkey.

WTF Wednesday

2010-11-17T10:54:00.000-05:00

I wanted to bring this to all of you on Sunday, when I heard about it, but Lindsay reminded me that it would be just as WTF on Wednesday. And it is.

By now a few of you have probably caught wind of Toews and Kane's awful, amazing, awful cell phone commercial, maybe via PuckDaddy's play-by-play. If not - here's the gist:

Jonathan Toews is sitting in an outdoor cafe, spies an attractive lady at the next table, then proceeds to take a picture of her hand (don't ask me - I don't keep track of the Blackhawks' kinky fetishes) with his cell phone, and sends it off to his bff Patrick, who I guess has the magical ability to tell how attractive a woman looks just by getting a cameraphone picture of her fingers. He gives Toews the green light to pursue, and cautions him against using the phone's pick-up line app, presumably because Kane wants to keep all the really bad pick-up lines for himself (tell me he doesn't seem the type). The rest of the commercial is one big steaming pile of increasingly mounting awkwardness, that...

I don't know, maybe I'm the only one. Tell me, ladies, if a stranger sidled up to you at a restaurant and had barely said hello before he whipped out his cell phone, laughed, said "I've got one funny friend", and showed you a picture of a different guy sandwiched between two other girls, would you or would you not expect to presently be invited to some sort of orgy? If Jonathan Toews did that to me, I would be running away, quickly, maybe in search of an officer of the law.

Thankfully, someone besides myself saved the video before it was mysteriously taken off Youtube, so you can watch it here. (If it gets removed again, let us know. We've got your back on this one. The world needs to see this.)

Moral of the story: Ladies (or possibly men), if you ever see someone across the room take a picture of your left hand, run. Run quickly.

Don't mess with Detroit

2010-11-12T19:17:00.007-05:00

If I were asked to list my three most hated things this week, I would say:

1) Spiders
2) Getting asked if I know Eminem when people find out where I live
3) People who live outside the Metro area and insult the city of Detroit.

Three things about life I truly love might be:

1) The corner of 8 Mile and Shadyside
2) Tim Hortons Iced Capps (made with chocolate milk, obviously)
3) When large groups of people band together for a common cause. Especially when it entails some fool gettin' told.

It seems like this happens a couple times every year. A journalist sits down at his laptop, considers the vast, rich landscape of possibilities open to him through which to steer his readers, weighs them against his subject matter, his abilities, and his deadline, and goes the lazy man's route - straight through the heart of every man, woman, and child who feels insulted when Detroit's insulted too. And then those men, women, and children who have internet access assemble to give him the what for.

You might want to read the first couple paragraphs of this sparklingly brilliant work of journalism before continuing. Ahem.

"Muggy with a chance of murder"? How dare he mock southeast Michigan's relentless summer humidity. Until you've lived here, you just don't understand the indignity of watching your carefully flat-ironed coif spring up a frizz-halo three inches in every direction from your head. He's clearly balding. And heartless.

In all honesty though, I write about this because it angers me. Maybe not this specific article per se - Detroit's been jabbed so many times that Tychkowski's jab didn't even penetrate the scar tissue - but the stereotypes his comments stemmed from rouse my ire. Maybe it's because I spend eight months out of the year a school telling people that 8 Mile really isn't that interesting, and is mostly gas stations, used car lots, and strip clubs. Maybe it's because I've personally felt the effects of the auto industry crumbling, watched friends and family members search endlessly for jobs to no avail, and watched as home foreclosures sprung up around my neighborhood like dandelions. True, the city has its problems, we can't ignore that - but to exploit them for a cheap laugh and a catchy anecdote is to cheapen the experiences of everyone who lives in the Detroit-metro area.

Which, ultimately, is what this article amounted to. Tychkowski was trying to draw on a parallel between the crappyness of his team's play and the crappyness of the city of Detroit. It was just a little flourish of rhetoric wordplay. Removed from its geographical context, the turn of phrase is almost clever. He's probably a bit confused why his article has garnered over a hundred comments of angry backlash. I'm not confused. It's because we get judged on vacation when we tell people we're from the Detroit area. Because we get immediately defensive when we see the name of the city at the start of a news article not written by a local publication. And it's because EdmontonSun.com has a comments feature, whereas network sitcoms, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and the Times Magazine sitting in your doctor's waiting room - all of which have been guilty of laying down the hate on Detroit - do not.

Mickey Redmond was even peeved about this:

"It's completely unnecessary, uncalled for, unrelated to the game of hockey," said Redmond. "If it was an attempt to be humorous, it was a lousy attempt at that. It was not necessary. You're beating up on a city that obviously doesn't need it"

If I used this blog to occasionally disparage against Canada, particularly northern Alberta, I probably wouldn't get publicly told off by the Oilers color guy, which is almost a shame, because our Wikio ratings would go bananas.

Anyway, Tychkowski, you pulled the "lol Detroit sucks" card, and now you're taking the heat for it. I don't know you - you might be a nice guy who feels like a real ass right now (some of those comments had considerably stronger wording than Mickey's), but maybe next time you'll choose your words more carefully. At any rate, you did manage to write one great, succinct, infinitely truthful Detroit-related line the other night - "The Wings are good."

Yes. Yes they are.

Do you know what I love about Henrik Zetterberg?

2010-11-08T22:56:00.005-05:00

Everything.

Which is exactly what I loved about the ten seconds following Dan Cleary's goal and the final three seconds of that game.

We haven't posted here in two weeks, and that's unacceptable. When this blog dies, it won't be a slow, languishing death wherein the space between posts gets wider and wider and wider until one day there just aren't anymore. No, if we go, we go with fireworks and explosions and eight page retrospectives and a big drunken party that you'll all be invited to - that's a promise. To keep that promise, I have to sit here tonight and write until I have something resembling a hockey blog assembled.

- The Wings were outplayed for a decent chunk of the game Monday, which was reflected in the score, and the fact that the game went to overtime. This continues a trend. Because it's November, and they're winning most of these games anyway, I feel like I can afford to look the other way for now, and tell myself that everything will work itself out by spring. (I will regret these words eventually.)

- Someone needs to tell Dan Cleary that scoring a goal for his team does not mean that he's in any way obligated to assist the other team in doing the same.

- I'm not sure why Salei decided that jumping on Howard would be in our team's best interests this evening.

- Rafalski made his return in this game. I have no idea how he looked, because my eyes unfocused every time the puck went into our defensive zone.

- Have I mentioned how much I love Henrik Zetterberg?

- Andy Brickley didn't say "tremendous sex" this time, which is always a disappointment.

- The Wings' next game is on Thursday, against the Oilers, again, only this time you don't have to stay up until 2am eastern to catch the end of it.

And because I have nothing more relevant to say, here - have a picture of Wayne Gretzky about to eat his own daughter at a golf tournament. Because the Wings are between games with Phoenix and Edmonton, it's sort of relevant, if you squint, and maybe cross your eyes a little.

This Game Was Ridiculousness

2010-10-24T00:13:00.006-04:00

First of all, RIP Orange Hat Guy. It's a rare thing in major league sports when a fan garners as much notoriety as you had, and rarer still that it wasn't for doing something mind-blowingly idiotic in an attempt to draw attention to yourself. All you did was show up to every game in headgear the color of pure, unfiltered awesome. For that you were known, and for that you will be missed.

...

Alright, the Wings won, so I'll be a good sport about this.

Congratulations to Teemu Selanne on tying Bobby Hull for 15th place in all-time goals scored. Actually surpassing him's probably going to be a bigger deal for everybody involved, but Selanne's unlikely to do that against the Red Wings, and I'm not going to find out about it until three weeks after its happened, so this is my only chance. 610 is a heck of a lot of goals to score, but according to the Jets, Selanne's been the "Boss" for the last five hundred and fifty-six of them. Although maybe at some point between then and now he scored enough to take the quote marks off "Boss" so reading it out loud didn't make it sound condescendingly sarcastic.

Who was the old boss I wonder? Was it Tie Domi?

Yeah, I bet it was Tie Domi.

Also tied tonight was the goalie record for most consecutive non-losses in regulation since the lockout (which seems like an awkward thing to keep track of, but whatever). Jimmy tied Ozzie. Do you know what that means?

That means the Red Wings are awesome.

But not so awesome that I don't get to complain about inconsistent play. (When the Red Wings aren't winning games, like the first half of last season, I look back on posts like this one, read what I've written, throw up a little in my mouth at what a spoiled brat I must be to ask for more than two points, and pray to the hockey gods that my idiocy never astrally contributes to the rise of a second Dead Wings era. But this blog hasn't been updated regularly in a while, so I'm risking it.)

There were so many moments in that game that were so spectacular that it gets hard to remember all the awful, cringe-worthy moments that sat between them. Which is part of what makes it frustrating. Howard actually said it best in his post-game interview on Thursday - that when the guys decide to play, they're scary. (I don't know if he actually meant to call the whole team out in front of the media, but... he was saying what we were all thinking.) Can they make the playoffs by only doing the bare minimum required of them to succeed the whole year? Yeah, they can. They showed that they can this week, by pulling points out of games they didn't show up to for the full 60 minutes. But that's not what I want to see all season.

It's like that genius kid you knew in high school who failed all his classes because he was too bored to pay attention. I knew that kid. He never went to college and now he's 25 and (bear with me here) still unemployed, living out of his mom's basement and making me weep for his wasted potential.

The playoffs are college. And if the Red Wings get bored and lose all their regular season games, I'm going to be 24 and curled up in my mom's basement, weeping for their wasted potential.

Why do I start freaking out about this kind of stuff in October? Last October my soul died a little every game the Wings lost, which was almost every game. I would have killed for this October. Forget everything I just said, you guys. I don't care how they do it. Let's be happy for the win.

The next games on Thursday. Thursday. Have you ever woken up on Monday morning, screamed into your pillow because you had to go to school/work, and thought about the endless, unceasing, infinitely long string of hours you have to live through to make it to Friday? Add a day to that. That's how long it is until the next Wings game.

Are the ridiculous schedules a byproduct of having to coordinate 82 games for 30 teams? Is it because of the conference/division system? Is it the network tv slots? Bettman? Is it old? Is it new? Am I imagining it? I'm serious. The scheduling process is, given all the varied aspects of hockey as a game and a business, probably the thing I'm least-informed about, which is stupid, because as a fan, it usually affects me the most directly. If any of you guys have better insight into this, please - enlighten me.

Hockey & Death Glares & Birthdays, Oh My.

2010-10-13T16:36:00.005-04:00

Boy, does it feel good to have hockey back (not that I've really been able to enjoy it yet, because I've been running around this semester like a crazy person). But I can honestly say that nothing feels as good as walking up to a pop machine and scaring away the huge guy in the Blackhawks shirt when he catches a glimpse of your Red Wings attire.

That's a lie- This was better:

And since it's Wednesday, I wish I could leave you with a WTF moment. But since I can't, I'll leave you with this:

Today Hockeytown Static turns 24. Well, not the blog, but the main person behind the blog. Happy birthday, Trisha!

Two points to start the year off

2010-10-08T23:21:00.006-04:00

Some of you might remember a few years back when Corey Perry promised Pavs that he was "gonna get it too".

Well tonight Pavel got it, and "it" turned out to be the long-missing piece of a Gordie Howe hat trick.

(There's a better quality video on YouTube, but it was the Duck's feed, and no one needs to hear that)

(David Guralnick)

(Which means that he's tied with Gordie Howe now. Awesome.)

It's almost not fair that something this ridiculous happened tonight, because I feel like the internet coverage it's bound to get will far outweigh the four goals and Howard's shutout, which alone would have made this a more spectacular start to the season than I could have hoped for (or would have hoped for, because me thinking positively before the start of a hockey game bodes ill for my team). This game went above and beyond all my long, hockey-starved summer-fed hopes, dreams, and expectations.

Some thoughts on the actual gameplay:

I'll be honest - there were long stretches during that game that I was busy trying to figure out how to fit the circumstances leading up to things like the entire top line hitting the penalty box into a text (because Lindsay was at the Griffins home opener. I swear, every time something like that happens, I have to figure out how to get the story to her in under 200 characters), so I'm pretty sure I missed some important stuff, like whether the Wings were legitimately dominating or if the Ducks had been replaced by Windsor Timbit hockey kids, but if you're coming to this blog for Serious Sports Commentary like what the big smart men do on ESPN, you're in the wrong place anyway.

(And if you're looking for hockey commentary on ESPN, then you're wronger than Darren McCarty in an Avs jersey.)

But most of what I did see I'm excited about. Jimmy looked pretty strong out there, especially in the second period. Dan Cleary was getting knocked around out there pretty good and getting right back on the ice, but that's sort of like saying today ended in a Y. And I like that the Wings were giving back all the physicality that the Ducks dished out.

On the other hand, I don't know if I want that to become a trend. Part of me still hopes that Franzen and his trick knee sit out tomorrow's game in Chicago. And the thought of Henrik Zetterberg spending the season getting cross-checked in the back sort of makes me want to vomit. Ericsson left tonight's game at some point with back spasms. I keep going back to last year's injury list and shuddering. And I still haven't seen Osgood play yet, just watched the preseason box score refresh and hoped the shots on goal stayed significantly higher than the goals allowed. I have a bad feeling that I'm going to be spending the winter banging my head against a wall while he loses games again. I don't know why I couldn't have been a normal kid and had my man-crush on Sergei Fedorov or something.

But whatever. The Wings got their first win on the season tonight, and that fills me with unending joy. Which I should savor while I have the chance, because I think we get to watch the Hawks raise a banner tomorrow night. (You know FSD'll cut to that thing every time they come back from commercial. And then Ken'll have to talk about it. And then I'll die a little inside.)

It's good to have goals

2010-09-15T20:45:00.001-04:00

It's cold outside. The top leaves on the skinniest trees are starting to twinge orange. The wind, though not yet icy, brings with it the scent of cold fronts to come. Schools are in session, and summer resort towns up and down Michigan's coasts are rolling up the sidewalks, lining beaches with winter fences, and repricing hotel rooms with off-season rates (supposedly. I'm pretty sure most of them keep the prices up for the fall-foliage tours). The Red Wings are back on Joe Louis Arena ice, and training camp is right around the corner. I'd say, if you asked me, that summer is over.

"This summer, we're going to set the lofty goal of at least 15 [posts]"

Bahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Counting this one, the one where I announced that we had a goal, and assuming that I'm not updating again until well into preseason, this blog has tied last summer's post-count. Which I actually consider a huge success.

The Hockey Music thing was only supposed to be summer filler, but (and I don't know whether this is good or bad news for you) I've decided to continue it until I run out of music to post about, mostly because I already had at least another five posts partially written. Also because I refuse to have tracked down Guy Lafleur's disco album for nothing.

You can expect all that - as well as the usual bitching, erratic posting, gross humiliation of plastic figurines, and speculations as to whether Jimmy Howard ever had a set of Spiderman footie pajamas that you've probably come to expect from this blog - within the next month, as Lindsay and I crawl out of our air-conditioned, hockey-deprived cocoons to rediscover the endless cycle of joy and heartbreak that comes with being a Red Wings fan.

Say hello to your newest Red Wing

2010-08-04T15:24:00.005-04:00

His name is Mike. He likes dogs

big hair

Willa Ford

crying

And possibly Marty Turco

which could get a little complicated next season, what with him being a Blackhawk now.

A lot of people seem to have mixed feelings about his coming to Detroit, but it's been my experience that the more sad-eyed, hockey-scarred old men the Red Wings have on the team, the further they get in the playoffs, so you can tentatively throw my name on the list of local family members, old friends, and kids who spent their afternoons at his ice rink that comprise his ready-made Detroit-area fanbase.

The Greatest Hockey Music Ever Written - Part III: Dionne and The Puck-Tones

2010-06-26T01:17:00.001-04:00

I love Marcel Dionne's story because it's the kind of tragedy that you don't feel completely awful finding hilarious. Probably the saddest part of it is that despite still ranking 4th in all-time goals scored and 5th in all-time points, becoming the third player to reach 700 goals, and remaining the highest scoring French Canadian player in the history of the leauge (no, really. Look it up.), he remains largely unmentioned in discussions of "the greatest players of all time". He's one of the NHL's forgotten superstars.

He's better remembered by Red Wings fans as the guy who wanted out. In 1975, after three years of on and off bickering with coaching staff and management, Dionne moved to the Los Angeles Kings as a restricted free agent. Because during the 1974-75 season he had set a club record of 121 points (on a team which held a winning record for a whopping ten games), the Detroit fans were a little upset. The Kings fan was, understandably, very excited.

Alas, life in Los Angeles wasn't all Dionne had hoped it would be - local interest in hockey, to this day tenuous at best, was still in its infancy, and, as he himself put it, "we didn't have the supporting cast". The Kings were perennial early-round knock-offs, and Dionne became another name in a long list of hockey players to be quoted about wishing they'd never left Detroit. In a last-ditch attempt to motivate his team to a championship, Dionne hatched an elaborate scheme which involved pretending to demand a trade. Then Kings GM Rogie Vachon called his bluff and sent him off the the New York Rangers, who were also in the midst of a long-term Cup drought.

aw man, this shit sucks.

So it's my hope that if he's not going to be remembered for being one of the top scorers in league history, maybe he'll be remembered for Dionne and the Puck-Tones' "Please Forgive my Misconduct Last night".

Recorded by Dionne and his Triple Crown Linemates Charlie Simmer and Dave Taylor, "Please Forgive My Misconduct Last Night" was part of a record produced to help benefit juvenile diabetes research, so I guess it can be somewhat excused that the boys needed professional background singers and probably a little 70s-era auto-tuning to keep them sort of on-key. And we're still not talking "hey these guys are pretty good" on-key, just "well I guess at least this is for a good cause" on-key.

But as much as I love listening to hockey players butcher music, the real beauty of "Please Forgive my Misconduct" is in the lyrics. If you've ever found yourself in a position where you've been too frisky with a lady-friend and needed a creative way to apologize for your forwardness the next day to save the relationship, this is your song. Unless of course she's not a big fan of hockey, or wordplay. I'd quote from them, but I don't even know where to begin. Please just listen for yourselves - this is a song that needs to be experienced.

And actually, it wasn't even released as its own single. It was the B-side to "Hockey Sock Rock" by Phil Esposito and the Ranger Rockers!!! (the triple exclamation points are actually on the album cover) which you can read about here. Unfortunately, the crown jewel of that post, the 1979 Rangers Sasson Jeans commercial, was taken off Youtube recently, so here you go:

Funny story about the Rangers Sasson Jeans commercial - there were two of them. And what the second lacks in Ron Duguay's hair, it makes up for in prancing. Or maybe the right word is mincing.

I hope that if those didn't destroy your world, they made your day.

Whoa, where did June go?

2010-06-24T13:34:00.003-04:00

I said we were aiming for fifteen posts this summer. I didn't say they wouldn't all be the last fifteen days before the season opener.

Today is the day before the draft, the day after the NHL awards, and one nerve-wracking week away from free agent frenzy. This is like a sad island of hockey in the middle of a long, hot, hockeyless sea. And yet, I feel as though I have nothing useful to say.

Except that HOLY CRAP NHL AWARDS WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE WITH SPONSORSHIP AND PRODUCT PLACEMENT? The ads were so deeply woven into the fabric of the show itself (they actually had the Gieco caveman running around, antagonizing Mike Green, and they actually had the United States Army present Shane Doan with the King Clancy Memorial Trophy, which sort of seemed strange) that the giant flashing Verizon logo during the first musical number seemed like a sad and desperate cry for attention. Come on, Verizon, you can shell out an extra 500 bucks for a custom graphic of like a cell phone playing hockey or something. But I don't know, maybe they just pasted that onto the Versus feed, since they don't even have Verizon in Canada.

I was expecting Ron McLean to come out with sponsored eyebrows again.

All I know is that after watching the NHL Awards, I don't want to join the army or buy insurance. I just want hockey to be back.

Expect another music post to be up in the next day or so. You might want to start airing the mothball scent off your Marcel Dionne jerseys in anticipation of this one.

Lidstrom's not retiring yet

2010-06-01T15:02:00.005-04:00

I got the best email in the world today. It linked to this.

This is jumping around the house in celebration-worthy for three reasons:

1. NICK LIDSTROM IS COMING BACK NEXT YEAR

2. I get to stop having to listen to the analysts on CBC segue from Blackhawks goals to their opinions that Nick Lidstrom is retiring

3. Lindsay is done crying emo tears of sadness on the couch and actually becomes a functioning member of society once more.

If you're not sure how to react to this kind of news, The Triple Deke has suggestions. I'm going to celebrate by blowdrying the tears out of the couch cushions.

The Greatest Hockey Music Ever Written - Part II: We Counted on the Captain

2010-05-27T13:25:00.005-04:00

To be honest, I wanted to save this song for later in the summer when I hadn't posted for two months and was sick with heat and tired of Lindsay yelling at me to write something, because I knew it was going to be an easy song to write about - but given recent developments, I felt that the timing was appropriate.

After spending a day and a half in stunned partial-mourning at the news that Steve Yzerman had taken the gm job in Tampa Bay, I began coming to terms and decided that he deserves to be happy, even if happy means opening a chain of Denver sports themed sports bars in Denver (oh god, please no). And while being ok with it doesn't mean I won't fight the urge to vomit every time I see him in another team's colors, his leaving for Florida isn't nearly as emotionally traumatic for me as it was when he retired four years ago. Four years ago, I felt like Yzerman needed more than a banner-raising and a goodbye celebration from the fanbase.

He needed a song.

Which brings us to Dick Fidge's 'We Counted On The Captain'.

Written in commemoration of Yzerman's 22 seasons with the organization, 'We Counted On The Captain' is 3 minutes and 25 seconds of your life that you cannot afford to spend doing anything else.

A lot of the music I went through to pick the songs I wanted to use this summer sort of killed my soul to have to listen to multiple times, but 'We Counted On The Captain' was not one of them. This song has been in my music library for two years now, and I can highly recommend it for blaring out your open windows in parking lots to get funny looks from people and secretly rocking on your iPod earphones when you're surrounded by a bunch of dirty Blackhawks fans. Granted, I come from a belief that any song which opens "In 1983 he was a rookie sensation / Stevie Y was all-star bound" can do absolutely nothing wrong from then on out, so your enjoyment may vary.

One of the real highlights of this tune (aside from the fact that IT WAS WRITTEN ABOUT STEVE YZERMAN) is the synth solo at 1:12 (which is, to my knowledge, the only synthesizer solo EVER composed in honor of the Captain).

And has your love of Yzerman ever built up inside of you such that you felt you had to let it burst forth from your body in a sublime falsetto "STEEE-HEEEE-HEEEEEEEVIE YYYYYY-HIIII!!"? (Don't lie. You know it has.) Then you can sing along at the 2:50 mark.

This song is the first time you'll notice a reoccurring theme in this blog - songs to which my response is "a little cheesy, but it's about the Red Wings, so I can't not love it".

Is it stuck in your head yet? You're welcome.

The Greatest Hockey Music Ever Written - Part I

2010-05-19T13:30:00.005-04:00

I know when I made the introductory post to this series, there was an implication that all the music was going to be awful, but we're going to start this thing off with a song that isn't that bad at all (unless you listen to it fifteen times in a row while you're trying to write about it to block out the noise of your family being crazy all around you, in which case it snakes its way into your brain and NEVER COMES OUT AGAIN).

Stompin' Tom Connors was born ~~a poor black child~~ Charles Thomas Connors in New Brunswick in 1936. He spent the bulk of his youth wandering itinerantly and writing spectacular folk songs that, as an American, I have never heard of. His lasting contribution to hockey music occurred in the early 70s:

Stompin' Tom Connors - The Hockey Song

Love it or hate it (and I've actually met people who really, really hate it), it's the consummate hockey song, and we really couldn't write about hockey music without mentioning it.

Of course, if the original really doesn't do it for you, you can try this Swedish version, which is in English with heavy accents, and has Peter Forsberg scoring the first goal instead of Bobby Orr-Hull-Clarke-Whatever. If Don Cherry hasn't heard this yet, I want to be there the first time he does, with a wheelbarrow, so when he shits bricks over its existence I can take them home and build myself a garden shed.

We're not dead

2010-05-17T16:41:00.003-04:00

This isn't really a blog entry. This is a notification that in the near future there will be more blog entries.

Last summer we made a grand total of 8 posts. This summer, we're going to set the lofty goal of at least 15 (wow! 15 whole posts! That's more than we made in the whole entire month of January! Gee golly!). This isn't an empty threat, either. This summer Hockeytown Static is bringing you

The Greatest Hockey Music Ever Written

even though by "greatest", we usually mean "most embarrassing to admit we actually have saved to our computer".

So whether it's holiday cheer from Johnny Bower, unintentional (maybe) sexual innuendos from Guy LaFleur, or synthesizer solos in honor of The Captain, we hope you can pull yourself away from the beach often enough to join us.

Todd Bertuzzi's Beard

2010-05-07T23:56:00.006-04:00

The Red Wings have made enough deep playoff runs in recent years that the fans have come to understand that each one of their playoff beards has its own personality. Kris Draper's once beat Chuck Norris in a fight. Niklas Kronwall's fights crime while he's sleeping. Johan Franzen's apparently gives him superpowers (thanks for the curly fries, Mule. They were delicious).

But Todd Bertuzzi's sort of looks like you're gazing into the void.

yeah, that's the best picture of it I can find.

And because when I gazed into the void the void gazed back, here's the top ten things hiding in Todd Bertuzzi's beard:

10. The rest of his teeth
They had to go somewhere.

9. Brett Lebda
Because he's very small. And he could fit in there.

8. Mike Ilitch's sanity
I love him, but he's crazy(bread).

7. Jimmy Hoffa
I'm just kidding. Jimmy Hoffa lives in a condo in Vegas with Elvis and Tupac.

6. The lost city of Atlantis
The weight of all those buildings could explain why he hasn't been doing anything overly useful the last few games?

5. Zordon
Maybe he got imprisoned in there by Rita Repulsa or something. That seems logical.

4. Free curly fries
They are delicious.

3. A KFC Double Down
He's got to have something to eat during intermission.

2. Whiskey for Larry Murphy
Is there room for enough of it though?

1. Gordie Howe's dog

Just in case Gordie's been looking for him or anything -- I suggest he start in Todd Bertuzzi's beard. That is an awesome sweater though. You couldn't pull that sweater off like Gordie can.

You think it's more likely there's a stripper in there? Leprechauns? The Art Ross Trophy? That's what the comments are for.

Game 5, the second in a series of four consecutive must-wins for the Red Wings, starts at 10pm eastern. If you happen to actually be at the game, you should throw an octopus or twelve. Scott'll show you how it's done.

Tinfoil Flashmob

2010-05-05T22:14:00.021-04:00

I don't have to tell any of you how awful the officiating has been in the eyes of Red Wings fans throughout the second round. After watching what felt like 120 minutes of penalty killing, a group of fans decided to take action against the NHL. The best way to do that? Block the brainwashing with hats made of tin foil. Clearly.

Just that happened before game 3. A handful of Red Wings faithful made and passed out hats before dancing the Hustle to The Hockey Song on the steps of the Gordie Howe entrance.

And Hockeytown Static was there to capture the magic.

And by "capture the magic", I mean Lindsay creeped awkwardly in the shadows near the box office with a digital camera.

I'm the chunky one on the right.

We'd actually like to apologize to everyone involved for showing up seconds before the dancing began, loitering creepily with a video camera and running away as soon as it ended. We were fully prepared to show up early and introduce ourselves to all of you lovely people, but I-96 had other plans. Furthermore, a dinner engagement (which we were also late to) sort of forced us into a dash-and-dine. But let me tell you - having a nice family dinner in a restaurant decked out like we were actually at a Wings game, tinfoil hats and all? Worth everything.

If you'd like to read up any other perspectives of the event, check out the Free Press, Snipe Snipe Dangle Dangle, it_burns_us's LiveJournal, Etched In Cold, and Mlive

The tinfoil itself didn't seem to bother Gary or the refs at all during the game, but the event itself was life-changing. It taught me about myself, about brainwashing, and about how hard it is to do the hustle on non-regulation-sized stairs.

As WTF as we can get this week - Joe Thornton Reads Goosebumps

2010-05-04T23:02:00.007-04:00

And that's not just speculation based on his naming his ventriloquist dummy "Slappy" as in the book from said series.

I mean, he actually reads Goosebumps, to Douglas Murray, for his bedtime story.

He also reads to Patrick Marleau.

But not to Dan Boyle, because Dan Boyle's been a bad, bad boy.

Or Nabokov, because he can read all by himself.

That's actually kind of an endearing picture. Just in case you're in danger now of warm feelings toward the San Jose Sharks, remember that they steal puppies and eat them.

That dog looks like she's been heavily drugged.

This post is the closest I can give to commentary on the series at the moment, because basically my brain gave me three choices - wax preposterously hopeful, vomit all over the internet, or do a search under "My Pictures" for "Joe Thornton" cross-referenced with "what the hell is this thing?" and post the results.

it didn't really make me feel better...

Furthermore, due to a dinner engagement (which we'll actually post about at length, along with in-depth coverage of the tinfoil hat flashmob on the stairs of the Joe) scheduled prior, both of us missed most of last night's game. So that's all I've got - St0ry Time with the San Jose Sharks.

Hopefully they're too entranced by Eric Carle's artwork in The Very Hungry Caterpillar to play very well in game four.

Wings win Game 7

2010-04-28T01:19:00.004-04:00

And they did it beautifully, defeating the Coyotes 6-1.

Next up: The San Jose Sharks

(Warning: Not for the squeamish)

Game 7

2010-04-27T16:33:00.001-04:00

Do you remember that feeling you had after game 5? Like you were invincible, and nothing could go wrong? You were so excited that you stayed up until three in the morning talking about how happy you were (yes, I'm looking at you Twitter).

Well I hope you do, because I don't. All my memories of that feeling were rushed out the door with the epic loss in game 6 and replaced with the sudden urge to puke up everything I've eaten in the last 2 days just thinking about game 7.

And now it's time for that puketastical game. It's do or die. Round 2 or golf. But this isn't the time to recite cliches, the time to make excuses, whine about soft goals or complain about defensive coverage or lack of scoring - this is the time to win. If the Wings come out flying they way we all know they can, there is not a single doubt in my mind that they will win the series. They CAN do it.

The question simply is will they?

Until this game starts, I will be attempting to keep my brain focused on the chronology of Roman emperors and not on Mike Babcock's hair. Partially to keep myself from puking. Partially so I don't fail my final.

Vote for Jimmy

2010-04-23T00:39:00.010-04:00

It looks like the writer's association took notice of Tiberius without Lindsay and I launching that guerrilla ad campaign we had planned. Oh well. There's always the All-Star game.

(No, you're not hallucinating. This is an autographed Jimmy John's bumper sticker with a picture of pedo-stached James on it, and I'm sure it's not the weirdest thing he's ever been asked to sign.)

Speaking of the NHL Awards, I spent the morning wondering whether someone decided that the Norris Trophy will now be awarded to the leagues most o ffensive defenseman (sort of like an anti-Selke). I'd be ok with that, I just wish someone would go ahead and make a public announcement. Then again, my sister just called to tell me that Mike Green's a plus 39 this season, so what the hell do I know?

* * *

I don't know how many of you actually watch the other playoff series. I usually do. (I'm not recommending it to you if you don't already do it - that triple overtime Penguins game last night was five hours of my life that I'm never getting back). I'm just wondering if anyone else feels like Bettman told the refs that EVERY MOTHER-F*&#$@G GOAL HAS TO BE CLEARED BY HIM PERSONALLY VIA VIDEO REVIEW. Do the guys in the War Room in Toronto get paid per ruling? Is this like some kind of magical Christmas for them with money flying everywhere?

Don't get me wrong - I don't want the playoffs decided by a questionable goal. But I also don't want to spend as much time twiddling my fingers in front of the tv waiting on a ruling as I do watching actual hockey. Just sayin'.

Today, the series goes back to Phoenix. The Joe was rocking Tuesday night, and we send it to you, Hockeytown West, to make their white out bleed red.

A special treat for our out-of-town readers

2010-04-19T13:55:00.004-04:00

If you watched yesterday's game on NBC in anyplace that wasn't southeast Michigan, you probably missed out on a critical portion of every NBC broadcast Red Wings playoff game - the Local 4 postgame show.

Bernie Smilovitz (who covers sports for Local 4 News) and Mickey Redmond sit in armchairs in a studio and discuss what went wrong while they wait for Katrina Hancock (who is approximately 8 feet tall (no really. She'll interview Chris Osgood, and the cameraman will have to pan down from her to reach his face.)) to convince players to say something interesting on camera.

In the spirit of the Wings' PR department's season-long "Hockeytown No Limits" campaign, and because we feel as though your lives are incomplete until you've experienced Local 4's ever-endearing awkwardness, we bring you a loosely transcribed version of yesterday's events.

Bernie: So Mickey - why did the Wings lose that game?
Mickey: Because they played like sh-
Bernie: Hang on, I'mma let you finish, but Tall Katrina has Henrik Zetterberg.

Tall Katrina: Hank, tell us why you lost that game today.
Hank: Well, um... *pouty-face* I think we yust need to keep playing our game, and um... *cries*
Tall Katrina: Bernie, back to you.

Bernie: Thanks Katrina. Now, Mickey, what do you think the keys to the Coyotes game were this afternoon?
Mickey: Well, they had a lot of puck possession down low, and one of their players still uses a wooden st-
Bernie: Hang on, I'mma let you finish, but Tall Katrina has Nicklas Lidstrom.

Nick: --of keeping the puck out of our sssone, and we need to be more physssical and not give up asss many odd-man chancesss.
Tall Katrina: What happened on that 2-on-1?
Nick: It was a 2-on-2 actually, but Raffi f#$%!d it up.
Tall Katrina: Back to you, Bernie.

Bernie: Thank you Katrina. Now, Mickey, what do the Wings need to do on Tuesday?
Mickey: They need to get in deep, keep the--
Bernie: Hang on, I'mma let you finish, but Tall Katrina has Jimmy Howard.

Tall Katrina: So Jimmy... What the hell was the matter with you today?
Jimmy: *voice actually quivers this is not a made up fact* I need to be better.
Tall Katrina: Are you less nervous three games in?
Jimmy: OMG U GUYZ I WASN'T NERVOUS TO BEGIN WITH.
Tall Katrina: What did Ozzie say to you just before this interview started?
Jimmy: He told me to pretend this game never happened. And I'd really like to.
Tall Katrina: Back to you Bernie.

Bernie: Thank you Katrina. Now Mickey -
Mickey: You gonna let me finish this time?
Bernie: Yes.
Mickey: Well I think Jimmy did the right thing, owning up to the fact that he needs to be better, and --
Bernie: Hang on, I'mma let you finish, but Tall Katrina paid Justin Abdelkader five dollars to talk with her.

Tall Katrina: Hi Justin.
Justin: Hi.

At this point I wandered out of the room because I was getting cranky and they weren't talking about anything interesting.

The Wings don't play again until Tuesday and they need a win or else this situation is going to get ugly.

Thought Bubble of the Day: What do you think the arena staff was thinking when the Cusimano brothers threw the first octopus back in 1952?

1st round playoff preview, as promised

2010-04-14T12:02:00.001-04:00

This thing is a monster, even after I took out the three paragraphs on comparative symbology. I will totally understand if you just skip to the boobs at the end.

When the Winnipeg Jets moved out to the barren deserts of Arizona for the 1996-97 season, they weren't exactly expected to have immediate and bounding success and draw in a large, thriving, profitable fanbase. At least, I really hope they weren't, because they didn't. They really, really didn't. The success they had was small, and the truly devoted fans they garnered were scant. But this season, despite bankruptcy, despite nearly being moved half-way across the continent again, despite years of being one of the jokes of the league, proof positive that the southern US was no place to have hockey, the team overcame, and, as 4th seed in the western conference, have a legitimate shot at Lord Stanley's Cup. As a fan of hockey, and of sports in general, I want this Cinderella story to be able to warm my heart with the fuzzy feelings only achieved by watching bands of brothers overcome adversity prehistoric tribal-style, by beating down all the bigger, meaner tribes with sticks and then hugging it out at the victory feast.

Unfortunately, Cinderella's playing the Wings first round, so there will be no such fuzziness.

The Team:

This is a Coyote venturing out onto a road to meet its ancient
enemy the flying tire in glorious battle

This year, I think the Wings' biggest threat will be not treating the Coyotes as a legitimate threat. They seeded above us, and Babcock's no idiot, so my fears are probably unfounded, but I don't think the Red Wings are used to the mindset of "ok, we're below them, so we're going to have to be really careful and try to upset", and they also have a history of not always bringing their A-game to the ice when they're playing someone they're not scared of. And you know Ilya Bryzgalov's going to be a whore.

There's also going to be a few familiar faces:

Yep. Matheiu Schneider's still in the NHL.

So is Robert Lang.

And while Ed Jovanovski has never been a Red Wing, at least one current member of the team is very, very familiar with him.

omg get a room, you two.

The Fans:

First of all, to get this out of the way, are you one of those people who love a good internet battle, but haven't been online in like three days? You should look here, here, and especially here. Now onto business.

I write this entry (and indeed, every entry of this blog) under the assumption that at least nine of the ten people reading it will accept the following as common knowledge:

1. The economy in Michigan sucks hardcore, and lots of Michiganders have been forced to move out to the booming west

2. You don't stop following the sports teams you followed as children (and your parents followed as children, and your grandparents, and your own children) just because the desert is the only place you seem to be able to keep your family fed and clothed.

Phoenix, however, seems to be under the impression that you should just cheer for whatever team you happen to live most near. Rebuttals have been undertaken by better writers than I. If that's the actual mindset of the fans and media, then I pity the Coyotes their fly-by-night bandwagon. I'd never ask any legitimate fan of any team to forgo their loyalties based on something as stupid as geography (especially not in the internet age), and I'm more than slightly offended that there are other people out there willing to ask this of Red Wings fans, who during the playoffs, I consider one and all to be family.

Furthermore, in yet another sad attempt to usurp the authority of the octopus tradition, the fans have embraced the idea of throwing snakes (I'm assuming rubber) onto the ice, to support their team, rattlesnakes being indigenous to the area. On the one hand, I'm inclined to agree with PuckDaddy - this could be the rallying point the fanbase needs. You don't hear "Winnipeg" or "Hamilton" and think "snakes live there"; you might when you hear "desert" or "Arizona". The snakes would represent the fact that this team belongs to Phoenix, belongs in Phoenix, and though it might not have the rafters filled with championship banners and retired numbers, it will bite if cornered.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure no one in Phoenix thought this far into it, and the snakes are only there to piss off Wings fans by farting on a tradition that celebrates its 58th anniversary today. Those are real unclassy intentions, guys.

Also, the comments to this post, suggesting that instead of throwing them, the fans wave them above their heads, one in each hand, make me think we're about to watch a hockey game played in an arena full of Minoan fertility idols.

Yeah, you didn't know this post was going to be about anthropology, did you? (And before you get excited about all the Coyote fans showing up topless, remember that they're Coyote fans, so they'll be wearing white shirts.) (and they'll mostly be guys.) (and they won't like you because you're wearing red.) (You'll be wearing red, right? You have to wear red.)

The puck drops at 10pm eastern. We'll have our coffee in one hand and our barf bag in the other. Go Wings.

The regular season ridiculousness is finally over

2010-04-12T22:13:00.014-04:00

To commemorate the ending of this season and the Wings' sendoff into their 19th consecutive playoff run, Hockeytown Static is pleased to bring you our first annual Static Awards. What makes this completely arbitrary list of players we thought did good for 82 games any different from any other blogger's completely arbitrary list of players they thought did good for 82 games?

All ours are named after Disney songs. You already know this is gonna be awesome.

The Zero to Hero Award for most dramatic turnaround: Jimmy Howard

This goes to Jimmy Howard, who went from a shaky back-up goalie everybody inexplicably hated to our number one guy for the playoffs with fans threatening to break the axels on his bandwagon in half.

The Perfect Isn't Easy Award for perfection: Nick Lidstrom

I shouldn't have to explain myself here.

The One Jump Ahead Award for most breakaways: Darren Helm

And he's damn lucky the award wasn't for most breakaway goals.

The Gaston Award for prettiest face and hair: Jonathan Ericsson

What a rockstar.

The I Just Can't Wait to be King Award for leadership by a player not currently wearing the C: Henrik Zetterberg

The argument could actually be made for a few different people to win this award, but I'm giving them out, so I say Hank gets it. The end.

The Whistle While You Work Award for officiating excellence: Dennis LaRue

Due to, among other things, his intent to blow waive off of what would have been Brad May's only goal.

Keep up the good work, dude.

The You Can Fly You Can Fly You Can Fly! Award for most gratuitous air caught: Patrick Eaves

He created a new word with this tumble. I think it deserves commendation.

The I'll Make a Man Out of You Award: Brad May

For staying after several practices to teach Justin Abdelkader the finer points of fighting. (He really did this. They even showed it during pregame a couple of times, but I couldn't find the video online.)

They were lessons that served him well.

The It's a Small World After All Award for worst English during interviews: Pavel Datsyuk

Pavel Datsyuk - making near-incomprehensibility super cool since 2001.

And finally - The Steady as the Beating Drum Award for dependable consistency is a tie between Tomas Holmstrom and Brian Rafalski.

Because sometimes these two fly a little under the radar, but they're out there every night, being exceptionally awesome.

We're going to have what for this blog passes as a series preview for the Wings first round series against the Coyotes up tomorrow. And I'd also like to give a belated thank you to everybody who reassured me in the comments of the last WTF Wednesday post that no time I ever spend photographing Patrick Roy on the back of a unicorn is wasted time. You guys are awesome.

Go Wings. (and let's all try not to puke too much during the playoffs.)

Well, the point streak had to end sometime

2010-04-06T23:51:00.007-04:00

First of all, it's been close to a week since we posted, and I have to apologize for that. Thanks to a combination of near-comical technical mishaps and the after-effects of a bona fide chiropractic emergency, this blog has taken a bit of a backseat. But we're back now, and there is hockey to be analyzed.

The last two games were at least as ugly as Ian Laperriere's face. The Wings came out this weekend with one of a possible four points, so I guess it could have been a lot worse, but... no, I guess it couldn't actually have been a lot worse. Not without someone getting injured. (Injured so they'd be out the rest of the season. Someone did get injured, it was Darren Helm, and it was in his delicate, boyish face. I hope his mother has Laperriere's phone number, and I hope she leaves him an angry voicemail. And I hope, having once been voted Denver's Father of the Year, that it tears at his cold, cold heart.)

In other news...

On Friday I got a very exciting package in the mail. At first I thought nothing of it because I've developed a minor addiction to staying up way too late and ordering free crap off the internet without remembering it in the morning, so I assumed it was just a new pen or a Newfoundland tour guide (did you know they have an island literally called "Random Island"? It's apparently a nice place to visit). Then I realized that it was from CafePress and practically ran yelling "HERM TO HOCKEYTOWN!" into our house. I opened the envelope and expected to find the three tiny H2H buttons we ordered, but instead found this:

Somewhere, there is a very confused (and very pregnant) woman who is trying to figure out what the hell H2H stands for. I wish her luck.

Making Fun of Partick Roy

2010-03-31T12:01:00.000-04:00

The day of game 4 of the 2008 Stanley Cup finals, our parents came home from an epic garage sale with a box full of hockey. Hiding among the dust was a plastic figurine of Patrick Roy.

Hey, ladies...

Despite our initial reactions (Lindsay didn't want to touch it, and Dad suggested we finally become real men and learn to melt things in the sun with a magnifying glass), because it spent games four and six in the living room in front of the tv (and game five hiding in the basement), it was spared certain death and bodily mutilation based on the fact that it must somehow be a luck talisman.

This hasn't stopped us from subjecting it to deep psychological and emotional torture. Jersey alterations took place sometime between the refrigerator prank and the catnip incident.

I tell you all this, because around our household, this week is known as "Make Fun of Patrick Roy Week", commemorating the time that Patrick Roy got his ass kicked by a midget, then a year later tried to redeem himself by fighting what looked like a fifteen year old boy and still had a hard time just holding his own. Because we think this side-plot to the McCarty/Lemieux battles is hilarious, we'd like to present you with -

Five other things we'd pay to watch Patrick Roy fail to fight:

5. A giant spider

Because who isn't afraid of giant spiders? They're terrifying. Even if you're not afraid of regular-sized spiders, you're scared of giant spiders, just based on the fact that THEY CAN EAT YOU.

4. Al the Octopus

Clearly, Al wins this battle.

3. Unicorns

Yeah, they may look innocent, but those things are out for blood.

2. Valtteri Filppula

I'd say Val winning any fight (especially by executing some sort of flying punch finishing move, as depicted above) would be a stretch, but a minute ago there were unicorns, so I'm going with it.

1. Jimmy Howard and his magnificent face-grabbing glove

They all said I was crazy when I bought this from Hockeytown Authentics last summer, but I knew. Oh, I knew.

Sometime during this photo shoot, my mom came out to see what I was doing and looked ashamed, because I'm 23 years old and was basically spending a Saturday afternoon in the backyard playing with my toys instead of doing something useful with my life, but if just five people read this and laugh once, then it was totally worth it. May the legend of Patrick Roy ride on.

6th place feels good.

2010-03-28T18:01:00.002-04:00

Happy 300th game to Patrick Eaves.

At least he can laugh at himself.

We here at Hockeytown Static hope all of you who attended H2H had a really great time. We cried for hours that we couldn't be there. And we would like everyone to know that there's going to be a next year, and we will be there. Plan accordingly.

(Our mother asked us how many people were going. And we learned something that day. We learned how difficult explaining the concept of The 19 was to someone who cares about stupid stuff like math.)

Last night's two points were BIGGER THAN GIGANTOR. Which sort of feels awful to say because, god, how long has it been since it felt good that the Wings were in sixth place in the West?

I don't generally care how the Red Wings win, so long as they're winning, and I think Niklas freaking Kronwall taking the shootout was spectacular. But that being said, I can't believe I sat through three and a half hours of nothing last night. 1st period? Nothing happened. 2nd period? Nothing happened. 3rd period? Nothing happened. Overtime? Nothing happened. I was glad to get to the shootout based purely on the fact that it was getting exponentially more likely that actual goals were going to get scored. And even then, it took five rounds for the pucks to start hitting the back of the net. What the crap.

Because whether you're cheering for your own team or you're groaning in anguish that the opposition's scored, a goal is a chance for you to release the tension you've built up watching the game. I didn't realize how important this was until Bertuzzi scored and the primal scream I let out was less "YAY" and more "FINALLY". The relief even felt good after I yelled at the Predators' shootout goal.

But you know what really feels good? That the Red Wings have been doing so well lately, winning so many games, and playing with such painfully surprising consistency that I've actually started finding things to bitch and moan about immediately following a win. So, dammit Wings, why couldn't you have scored sooner in that game? You're killing me over here.

(You can keep killing me as long as you keep winning.)

WTF Wednesday does Vegas

2010-03-24T12:25:00.005-04:00

You know how sometimes, in a situation, you know on a basic level what's going on ("Oh, ok. There's a man in a clown suit at the other end of this parking lot with a falcon on his arm.") but really, you have no idea what the hell is going on?

Well this is Luke Schenn, his younger brother Brayden, and Pavel Datsyuk going out together to watch a Beatles tribute show in Vegas.

I can make an educated guess as to what the circumstances behind this excursion were, but something tells me that even if the cameraman comments with what exactly is going on, I'll still have more "Why?"s than will ever be answered. If not concerning the players involved... then for the producers.

My favorite part might be the end, when they go backstage and one of the performers freaks the hell out. You can see the bewildered panic catch fire in her eyes, of holy crap I just performed for hockey players. It's sort of the same face Lindsay made when she found out Dom Hasek was at her dance recital (long story).

Bahahahaha

2010-03-23T13:22:00.005-04:00

After a back-to-back buzzer-beating weekend, I was pretty convinced that the Wings' luck had been all used up and that I would have to sit through the world's most miserable Penguins game I've seen since June, and maybe even ever because at least then I didn't have have to stare at Brian Engblom's mullet during intermission. Though I did have to listen to Pierre Mcguire. It's kind of a lose-lose situation, I guess.

if mcguire and engblom traded hair, my life would pretty much be over

BUT - if the Red Wings are going to keep doing what they just did, I don't really care what network I have to watch it on. They won 3-1, which would have been higher on both sides if both goalies weren't ridiculous (which for Jimmy I was pleasantly surprised and for Fleury I was unpleasantly unsurprised). And speaking of goalies, I'm probably the hundredth person to put this video up, but look me in the eye and honestly tell me you're already sick of watching Howard pull Crosby away from Bertuzzi (which was probably a good thing for Crosby) by his face.

Lindsay got a text message that this was happening, ran away from dance practice to the big screen tv in GV's fieldhouse, right in the middle of a group of kids studying (which made them all leave), and then sat on a table in front of said tv to watch Versus replay it. I'd worry that she's getting a reputation over there as "crazy hockey girl", but it's a big school, so she's probably got another solid year and a half of hijinks left before complete strangers start calling her out on it.

The win has us in 8th spot, four points ahead of Calgary. This is a spectacular day to be a Red Wings fan.

Where was this team four months ago? (don't say "injured")

2010-03-22T13:27:00.002-04:00

I'm still not entirely sure how I should react to what happened in the last game, except to flail my arms around and make funny noises, but I don't have any way to record something like that and upload it to the internet, so you'll have to use your imagination. Or you could go visit someone who actually found words to describe the awesomeness.

I also think that Ken Daniels should talk about Wings blogs more often, because as soon as Nightmare on Helm Street was mentioned on air, it seemed like all bloody hell broke loose. That game was equal parts awesome and ridiculous.

Now we have to go from that to watching the Sidney Crosby love parade tonight on Versus. Fun. The last time we played them, we lost in a shootout. Hopefully Zetterberg's "fuck shootouts" mentality carries over from Saturday night.

One point is better than no points

2010-03-20T00:18:00.009-04:00

Which is what we were going to get as of five seconds left in the third period.

You saw that, right? The last (literal) second of that game? The spectacularness that was Brian Rafalski tying the game with less than a second left in regulation? How freaking awesome was that! When does that even happen? Holy crap.

But it was just a point, when it could have been two, so I'm still posting the fruits of my third period labor:

HAHAHAHAHA I'VE COME TO CRUSH YOUR DREAMS!!!!!

I don't know. If I were an Oilers fan, and I knew my team had no shot at the playoffs whatsover, I'd want the Red Wings to streak off and MAKE THE CALGARY FLAMES MISS THE PLAYOFFS TOO, but I'm an angry, vindictive bastard, and a Wings fan, so even my imaginings of myself as an Edmonton fan have a pro-Detroit bias.

And hey, tomorrow's a new game.

(If the Wings had just flat out lost this game, I would have only posted that picture, no context, because I thought that would be the most spectacular 200th post to which this blog could ever hope to aspire.)

I bet the Detroit Purple Gang would win sixteen Stanley Cups in a row

2010-03-19T01:13:00.007-04:00

In the last week, the Red Wings have managed to climb their way back into the playoffs, and I've noticed my mood has been raising along with the Wing's point total. I'm not really surprised.

As everyone's favorite Brazilian tweeted Thursday night, a very bad thing has taken place. PuckDrawn held a contest for readers to submit "rebranded" jerseys. Doesn't sound like a very big deal? Well then, you clearly haven't witnessed the Detriot Pegasus (yes, DetRIOT. Clever):

Or the Detroit Purple Gang:

That is the most pimptastically awesome fedora I have ever seen, and if Detroit ever changes team names again, it should be to this, and Babcock has to wear one of those things every fricking game.

The Wings (still as the Wings, thank god) play Edmonton next. The Oiler's have this year's dubious distinction of being the first team to be statistically eliminated from the playoffs and I, never having played a team sport and being the spoiled rotten young Wings fan that I am, can only begin to imagine how that must affect the players who still have to play through the final fifteen games of the season knowing there can be no post-season.

And the Red Wings play them twice in the next week.

So the question is - will they, in their despair, lie down and give our team 4 easy points?

Or, having something to prove to the universe, will they proceed to CRUSH OUR DESPERATE HOPES AND DREAMS LIKE DELICATE GLASS FIGURINES IN THE PATH OF AN ANGRY STEAM ROLLER THAT IS ALSO ON FIRE BECAUSE I LIKE THE IMAGERY OF MAGICALLY BURNING CONSTRUCTION EQUIPMENT REPRESENTING THE WAYS IN WHICH HOCKEY CAN UPSET ME?

Um... Let's go Pegasi! Which is the plural of Pegasus. They should stay the Red Wings.

I don't hate the Wild so much when we're beating them

2010-03-12T15:26:00.004-05:00

The Red Wings have won every other game since coming back from the Olympic break, which would be great, if the rest of the western conference didn't intend of winning more than that, which apparently they do. *facepalm* *tears* *sadness*

But last night was one of those every other games, so everything was freaking spectacular. Jimmy was good, Franzen was amazing, Kronwall tried to kill everything on skates, and the Red Wings scored five goals. (We like to think it was because we went to the game and it was to make up for the double-home-shut-out ridiculousness we attended in November, but the Hockey Gods probably don't think we're that important.) Toronto even doled out a decision that was in the Red Wings' favor. Freaking spectacular.

Oddly, the only thing that wasn't right with the universe was a brief, un-perfect moment for Nick Lidstrom. At the end of the third period, he missed a pass that sent the puck gliding back towards the Wing's net and the crowd gasped in disbelief and confusion.

I even heard a few "That just happened?!" and "What? That was Lidstrom?! No!" For anybody else it would have been routine to the point of expected, but Nick did it, so it was the end of the universe. And that's why I love both Wings fans and Nick Lidstrom.

On a side note, the end of the month is looming nearer. And that means that Herm to Hockeytown is too. Unfortunately neither of us can make it to the game, but that hasn't stopped us from donating, and it shouldn't stop you either (you can even win some pretty cool stuff).

Final thought of the game: Where has Dan Cleary been? If we send him notes saying "Newfies can't score!!!!!!" will he start proving himself again? Because I miss his awesomeness dearly.

WTF Wednesday

2010-03-10T16:20:00.007-05:00

Let's be honest, the Wings need to win games. You know it. I know it. The Red Wings know it. It's starting to get a little critical, and with every loss I sink a little deeper into my pool of unending stress. And I'm not going to make a list of all the areas the Wings need to improve (at the top of which would be "winning games"), because hearing "defensive coverage is lacking" and "goaltending needs improvement" and "[insert name of scapegoat du jour here] needs to break his femur and never play hockey for us again" gets old after a while.

So instead of adding in our own pseudo-analysis to the log-jam, we here at Hockeytown Static have decided to do what (sadly) we do best - strange pictures.

And nothing is stranger than Red Wing goalies (past and present) doing what they do best - weird shit.

I have to start out with an apology that Jimmy Howard hasn't really been under the scrutinizing eye of the hockey paparazzi long enough to incur any pictures on the internet (that have floated by me so far, anyway) weirder than his weird-faced headshot from 2006

unless you think it's weird to see him in an apron, serving angel-hair pasta to homeless people in Grand Rapids.

*****

What's Ty Conklin been up to since he signed with St. Louis?

No, seriously, that's Ty Conklin. It's from the Blues' charity something something casino something, so it's not really all that strange, until you consider the fact that it looks like he grew and trimmed that facial hair especially for the event.

*****

This was real, honest to god cereal you could buy in the store. Steve Yzerman had some too - I think his had marshmallows. Proceeds went to charity.

I never tasted it, but I hear that Chris Osgood's honey nut deliciousness is Sharkie-approved.

OM NOM NOM NOM NOM

*****

And finally we get to the climax, where all the pictures that came before are rendered unnecessary to the point of useless, because Dom Hasek, god bless him, could anchor a wtf Wednesday all by himself:

These are from a photoshoot for a calender in the Czech Republic promoting literacy. It stars his daughter, Dominika, as Pipi Longstocking. And Dom as her... creepy, shirtless, tattooed father.

Here's him getting his make-up applied:

I can't even bring myself to come up with a decent response to this picture, and it's been on my computer since last summer. Just... wtf?

It's not the Arby's Curse - it's the Arby's Conspiracy...

2010-03-05T22:41:00.005-05:00

Some scattered thoughts (since lately that's all I seem to be having) on tonight's game:

Clearly the Red Wings need to sign Darren Helm for 2384873 bajillion years. And then start cloning him so he'll never get injured and never age. Games like this are why Lindsay's sacrificing the first two days of her spring break to own him as a bobblehead.

Over on the other end of the spectrum, Dear Todd Bertuzzi: don't ever do that again. I mean the entire game. Don't ever have a game like that again. Go back to surprising everyone with timely goals and intelligent plays. Please.

That goal by Datsyuk was the most spectacularly beautiful thing I think I've ever seen.

Someone in the organization made a swanky deal with Arby's didn't they? A deal which would prevent hat tricks while allowing for a ridiculous amount of advertisement. Today Darren Helm went along with it. Just like the whole club's gone along with it for the better part of two seasons. Everyone except Henrik Zetterberg.

Which is why I love Henrik Zetterberg. Because Henrik Zetterberg fights The Man.

The boys are back in town

2010-03-01T22:57:00.004-05:00

Well... they're back in Denver, anyway.

I'm not going to try to do any kind of Olympic wrap-up. Mostly because both Lindsay and I are still trying in vain to figure out how we're supposed to live our lives now that there aren't 8 hours of curling televised a day.

And a little because HOLY CRAP THE RED WINGS ARE PLAYING AGAIN ALSDJFLSKDJF.

And WE HAVE ALL OUR SWEDES BACK.

And HALF OF THOSE SWEDES SCORED GOALS.

amen.

- After literally more than a full year, Andreas Lilja made his triumphant return to NHL ice. I missed him, and his shot-blocking, and (in a sick and twisted sort of way) almost missed his laughably questionable defensive choices. Welcome back, Lils. I'd say start kicking ass, but that's how we lost you in the first place so... just welcome back then.

- I wonder how many Wings fans joined the Pepsi Center faithful in their booing of Todd Bertuzzi every time he touched the puck. (I mean besides Mike Petrella.) (And in case you had no clue what the hell was going on, here's the gist.)

- You know, I don't really feel like it's been a real Red Wings game until there's been at least one goal called off thanks to Homer's ass. (Not that I blame the lack of goal on Homer's ass. I'm pretty sure Kelly Fraser and Craig Anderson were the only people in the universe today who blamed Homer's ass for anything. And you can't really count Fraser, because I'm also pretty sure he blames Homer's ass for everything from flat tires to being out of strawberry ripple ice cream to John F. Kennedy's assassination.)

- Dear Versus: This whole "unfairly using Darren McCarty to make me hate you less" thing? Um... well... it might be working, but that excuses neither your video replay issues, nor your toolishness. But a solid B- for not being NBC. Keep working on it.

Were the Wings perfect tonight? No. Were they healthy, did they get two points, and did they beat the Avs in Colorado? Yes. So I have nothing more to say.

The Canadian media needs to CALM THE HELL DOWN

2010-02-24T16:39:00.009-05:00

This morning I put on CBC news. It spent two minutes on the Toyota recalls, and then brought in an actual sports psychologist to spend a half an hour talking about what Sidney Crosby needs to do to beat Ovechkin in their Olympic death match. They brought up how hard it was to beat the US, and the following words were actually spoken -

"Well at least we'll always have curling." Implying, I guess, that somehow another loss to the US would mean they didn't have hockey anymore.

And on the one hand, I want to tell them that it shouldn't matter who wins what at the Olympics, they still have hockey because their country honestly loves it, north to south, east to west - the United States has hockey on what really amounts to a state-by-state basis. It would be a pride thing for them to win, bragging rights, but it would be about the sport. Most Americans (but probably not the ones reading this blog) don't care if the hockey team wins, just that they beat all the other countries in everything. The sport doesn't matter to them, the smug sense of satisfaction that they get by being reaffirmed of their overwhelming superiority above all other countries (especially the stupid, over-polite, maple-sucking, socialist lumberjack host nation) does. (Case in point.)

Maybe that'll happen. Maybe Canada will lose on home ice and go home ashamed, and maybe it'll even be to the US and we'll be terrible and very stereotypically United States about it. I'm not going to apologize for my country's team doing better in the tournament.

And I shouldn't have to, because the state of Canadian hockey isn't at risk here. Canada's not always going to win gold in the Olympics, because international competition is a recipe for sheer ridiculousness. And even if they don't even make it to the podium, they'll still be ahead of everybody for medals historically.

So if you're a Canadian and you're reading this, and your country walks away from these games with less than gold, don't let it destroy your existence. The winners will have their medals, yes, and four years of bragging rights, but you'll still have kids out in backyard rinks from the end of school until sundown. And if you're less disappointed that the team lost than you are damn sick and tired of your southern neighbor's superiority complex (which is what I actually think is going on here), then just come out and say that. If our government didn't bomb France for calling us out for being assholes, we're sure as hell not going to bomb you. You're on the same continent. We could contaminate our own water supply.

On the other hand, that comment was an underhanded slight at the US men's curling team, and I sort of want to smack that woman for making John Shuster cry.

(And as a disclaimer, I love Canada, and the game last week was a real conflict of interest for me. I don't know why I rant at four in the morning. I'm going to get ten comments on this calling me out for fallacies in my logic that quote papers on the politicizing of sporting events in international competition, and then Puck Daddy's going to link to me, and every time he does that somebody calls me a chach.)

2010-02-19T21:53:00.004-05:00

OLYMPIC HIATUS

...

Because if the crappier hockey players get a 2-week vacation, the crappier bloggers should too.

Go team... uh... go everybody.

So... how about those glass ads?

2010-02-11T22:49:00.002-05:00

On the one hand, I'm sure I'll get used to them, and until Sam Bernstein (and I don't doubt this day is coming) pays for the rights to stick his face up behind the goalies during a game, I guess I can deal. Better than on the uniforms.

On the other, ALSDJFLASDJFAKSDF I CAN'T FOCUS ON WHAT'S GOING ON AROUND THE NET, SPARTAN FOODS, AND IT'S NOT DOING MUCH TO ENDEAR ME TO YOUR BRAND NAME.

Frankly, I'm sure if the Red Wings were winning more than half their games right now, I'd have the energy to send myself into a sufficiently frothy rage at today's over-bombardment of advertising and how I hate the way it's snaked itself into the fabric of modern professional sporting events, but the frustration of another shootout loss has sapped me of the necessary energy. Be glad. It would have been like five pages long.

There's not much I can really say about that game at the moment. A heck of a game for a lot of players. I can appreciate Nabokov's epic performance, even if I wish it'd been a little less so. And the Red Wings attempted, for the most part, to play at least fifteen minutes of hockey in every period. Up until the shootout, it was a fun game to watch. And we got a point!

But, I don't know, the Wings sort of need a win right now. And I have a bad feeling that when I wake up in the morning, Lebda, Meech, Maltby, Ericsson, Miller, Eaves, Osgood, Zetterberg, Rafalski, and Lidstrom will have been traded to Atlanta for two third round picks.

Oh dear sweet Hockey Gods, have mercy on my soul for this sin I have committed - I forgot how awesome Franzen was while he was gone.

Darren McCarty makes everything better

2010-02-10T15:19:00.003-05:00

Well, that was a... game. I guess. But I was probably setting myself up for disappointment. I've had this hope since October that when Franzen took to the ice again for a game there would be a flood of relief, a big flood, like the kind of flood that sweeps houses away and causes billions of dollars in property damage and untold emotional pain - the kind of flood where the government steps in to provide aid and talks about passing some kind of budget bill allowing for the funds to start building levies so it never happens again. Like one minute you're walking down the street, and then you're like "hey, what's that noi-" and then you're under like 20 feet of water. Relief water. Delicious relief water.

There was no sudden flood of delicious relief water. There was like... a relief water drinking fountain. And there was a line.

And now I'm cursed with the burden of having to compare every mustache I see for the rest of my life with The Mule's epic nose-beard.

I shouldn't be excited about the Red Wings "at least getting a point". Last season I was peeved when the team had the audacity to need to go through overtime and a shootout to beat St. Louis. Yesterday when they hit overtime, there was a fist-pump. And on top of everything, we had to watch the ridiculousness on Versus.

Except I think I can deal with Versus if Darren McCarty keeps being there. Franzen's return only reminded me of how injury-fucked this season has been, so Mac was really the high-point of the night. He seemed a lot more relaxed than the first time he showed up on Versus, and he broke rule number one of unbiased commentating when he proclaimed his undying loyalty to The Organization.

Also, he giggled like a fifteen year old boy when Bill Patrick said "Speaking of enormous loads...", which really made me feel better about giggling like a fifteen year old boy myself. And might have made me giggle harder.

Seriously, Kenny?

2010-02-06T12:33:00.003-05:00

Wings trade Ville Leino for Ole-Kristian Tollefsen and a 5th round pick in 2011 (which which, presumably, they'll pick Henrik Zetterberg's superstar successor).

Um... ok, I knew somebody had to go, maybe still more people, and Ville Leino was pretty damn high on everybody's hypothetical/prospective chopping block. You know, because he got scratched like every game. And his play... designated him semi-official fan scapegoat in Andreas Lilja's extended absence (don't worry guys - Lindsay saw him play in Grand Rapids last night - he's back to his shot-blocking, hard-hitting, questionable defensive choices self again).

And I'll miss him, because I was still holding out hope for him.

But who the crap is Ole-Kristian Tollefsen?

All we could find about him was that he was

a defenseman
a long-time Blue Jacket
Norwegian
incredibly injury-prone

I'm not really sure where Kenny's going with this. I really hope we just dealt Leino to get a guy, and not just took on a guy to get rid of Leino.

Groundhog Day

2010-02-02T12:45:00.006-05:00

Today is that magical day when Bill Murray movies are showing on eight different channels and we wait with bated breath for an ugly rodent in Pennsylvania to tell us that it's spring everywhere except Michigan, where it's still going to be cold, bleak, and unfortunate until the middle of May.

still winter, bitches

On top of that, tonight the Red Wings play a west coast team until two in the morning, whereas tomorrow the Red Wings play a west coast team until two in the morning. And given what we've come to expect from the broadcast team at FSD... well, I'll be honestly surprised if we don't get at least three groundhog day jokes.

Heres hoping Todd Bertuzzi gets a birthday hat trick so that we can all go to Arby's and get some birthday curly fries.

And maybe I should clarify, because this seems to be happening a lot lately - if he does get a birthday hat trick, I want the Wings to keep the lead until the game is over. Not over like there's two minutes left. Over like all the players have retired to their respective dressing rooms and have disrobed and showered and are giving interviews to the assembled media. All the way over.

You listening Red Wings? You have to play the whole game until it's over.

Or you'll make me cry.

Lets keep winning games. Please.

2010-01-30T21:55:00.004-05:00

I always thinks it's really funny to look at which games get picked up by Versus and NBC and then ask "why?" Like last year, when the Devils had to deal with at least two Versus feeds a month because Versus desperately, desperately wanted to be the ones to broadcast Martin Brodeur's record-breaking 603,478,021st win.

I mean, nobody came out and said as much, but it couldn't have been a coincidence. I don't love Versus, but I put hockey on as background noise, whatever the game, and every week, like clockwork, there was Doc talking about how New Jersey was holding its own while Brodeur was on the mend. (Their plan failed, but they dropped everything to show it anyway. And by "dropped everything", I mean "interrupted a Wings game".) No, not a coincidence.

Sort of like I doubt that it's a coincidence that Ken and Mickey aren't calling either of the games the Wings play against the Pens this season.

No, seriously. There's another one in March, on a Monday, picked up by Versus. The league could have scheduled one of them on a Friday night. Instead of playing into NBC's plans to break the network record for most utterances of the words "rematch" and "rivalry".

But I don't care about rivalries or rematches right now. Sure, if the knowledge that they're about to play the Penguins riles the team up into a higher level of play, if the chance at retribution helps them to win, then I want them to play the Penguins every night.

But I'm not playing in this game; I'm watching (or, more accurately, listening, because aside from not particularly wanting to watch the NBC feed, I'll be driving back up to Grand Valley for the better part of the game), and as much as I want to care that it's the Penguins my team's about to play, I don't really care who the Red Wings are playing, if it's the Penguins or the Panthers or the Olympus Mons Dust Mites, which are a fictional team I just made up who play in the Martian Senior League - I just want the Wings to win.

I could change my mind about that tomorrow, when I catch NBC humping Sidney Crosby's leg before I hit the road and switch over to Ken Kal. But as I type, I'm watching Calgary rape Edmonton as they bump us out of the eighth spot in the west, so fuck Crosby - my mind's on those two points.

Hey, is it Wednesday?

2010-01-27T13:53:00.002-05:00

Because after last night's game, I feel like some wtf.

And nothing is more wtf than Saturday morning cartoons from the early 90s. Especially Saturday morning cartoons from the early 90s staring Wayne Gretzky.

Have you ever found real Wayne Gretzky lacking? Thought that maybe he needed a bigger upper body? A more luscious-looking mullet? An arsenal of pucks that turned into boomerangs and then EXPLODED? If your answer to any of the above questions was OH YES PLEASE!, then today is the day your dreams come true.

"The Perbots of Dr. Lobe" (no, I'm still not really sure what a "perbot" is, exactly), wherein Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, and Bo Jackson attempt to save a vaguely ethnic child from a mad scientist using SPORTS! and... a giant magnet? Or something? Here's part 2 and part 3 where Wayne is sort of a whiny little coward.

I highly recommend you all watch the other episodes in the related videos section.

Preferably sitting on the floor in front of your computer in your pajamas with a bowl of Lucky Charms.

I guess success is a hard word to pronounce (EDIT- Now with video)

2010-01-26T22:17:00.010-05:00

I wish I could say I'm surprised, but I'm not. The Eurotwins were showing glimmers of their previous magic, Nick Lidstrom practically doubled his goal count, Jimmy was f-ing rediculous, and somehow the Wings still managed to blow a two goal lead with less than five minutes left in the game. Story of the season. Since I couldn't watch the last period of this game, Trisha was kind enough to send me text updates so at least I didn't have to sit through the pain of watching the disappointment unfold:

"LIDSTROM INSURANCE GOAL WHAT ARE YOU DOING AT DANCE THIS IS SPECTACULAR"
"Helm in box for the rest of the game I hope"
"Yep, there it is. 3-4 with a minute and a half"
"Draper missed the empty net, wtf?"
"F***ing Jovo tied it"
"Shane Doan to win. I blame this on Darren Helm"
"At least we got a point? I guess? Why do I keep forgetting that hockey is nothing but pain and heartache?"

In other news, did anyone else hear Andy Brickley say during pregame that Datsyuk and Zetterberg "have tremendous sex"? He was trying for "success". I mean, I know that when the Eurotwins are on the same line a lot of this

happens, but geeze man, watch your Freudian slips on live tv; I almost choked on my baked potato.

WOOOO DREW MILLER!!

2010-01-21T23:31:00.005-05:00

No one except Drew Miller's mom was thinking "Oh, Zetterberg, Bertuzzi, and Cleary couldn't score? Don't worry, Drew'll get us out of this one." Maybe they should have been, but they probably weren't.

It took the events of the last week, but Lindsay's finally been cured of her desire for every hockey game in the history of ever to end with a shootout testing the skills of every player on each team including the back-up goalies. Now she at least agrees that the Red Wings should stop that sort of ridiculousness immediately.

The Red Wings winning a game is an occurrence more rare this season than I'm accustomed to, so when it's happened lately, it's like it was a playoff game or something and I'm jumping around the house forgetting how either team played and am suddenly at a loss for anything to say besides some variation on "Yay we won".

But I can say that I don't really like the Minnesota Wild.

I'm not just throwing that out there, either. If I came on here and put the hate on all 29 other teams and fanbases that weren't my own, you wouldn't be surprised at all, because this is a fan blog, and I'm allowed (by some, expected) to be a ragingly biased, blinders-wearing homer.

But that's not what's going on here. I like players who aren't with the Red Wings. Some of them are legitimate superstars. Some of them are rugged role players. Some of them... make me question my own taste in hockey players and I really can't explain.

I DON'T HAVE AN ANSWER

And in the same way, I like teams that aren't the Red Wings too - granted, much less than I like the Red Wings, but so long as they aren't playing Detroit that night (playoff series and ugly incidents notwithstanding), I like them quite a bit.

But Minnesota isn't one of those teams.

Maybe it's because of the whole "stealing the name of Hockeytown" business a couple of years ago (which was an asinine argument anyway - it didn't start out as an awarded nickname, it started out as a marketing ploy, and Ilitch probably has the damn thing copyrighted, so... yeah, good luck with that), or maybe it's because they look like Christmas elves out there, which I find obnoxious. Or it could be because they make a big fricking deal about their arena selling out every night while there's empty seats in the Joe, even though the X-cel Energy Center seats less people than Detroit pulls in on an average night, even with the empty seats (and curse me for not bookmarking these statistics when I found them, but they're out there, somewhere).

Or maybe it's because I remember reading somewhere that the ethnic make-up of the team was actually designed to mirror the ethnic make-up of the state in which it plays (with strong French Canadian and Finnish ties), and that just sounds a little too racist to me, I don't know. "Sorry Petr Sykora, you're too central European to fit in our system. Good luck on waivers."

Ok, so that last one doesn't quite hold up to strict journalistic standards of citation, but I'm trying to find a rational reason why I hate that team so much, and I can't find one. Isn't irrational hatred bad? Doesn't it tend to lead to hate-crimes and genocide and...

You know what? I'm willing to deal with that risk and any bad karma if it means I can enjoy the following to its fullest and most spectacular extent:

Bahahaha beautiful.

Seriously, Chicago Tribune?

2010-01-21T17:25:00.004-05:00

So, the Red Wings haven't been doing so great lately. I mean, alright, they played pretty well the last few games, but... they didn't win them, as close as they came, and come playoff time, the real season, winning's what matters. Maybe you're getting a little disillusioned. A little frustrated. Maybe you're starting to turn your gaze elsewhere for your hockey needs (stay with me here) and this last week's epic-tacular bout against the Chicago Blackhawks caught your lonely eye.

Are you ready to become a Blackhawks bandwagon fan? They've written you a guide. Go, join their powerful, thriving caravan as it rolls towards its destiny. Patrick Sharp will be there with you, though he won't be looking particularly thrilled*.

Or maybe you're a girl. Here are four convincing reasons to go to games anyway, and a comprehensive guide to what you should wear once you decide to learn the ways of the puckbunny.

Chicago's real fan seems a little offended.

*I don't know, maybe that's just Patrick Sharp's face. I try not to look at Patrick Sharp too closely since last spring, because even though a lot of players are different people on the ice, I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around the thought that someone who looks like such a nice guy almost speared off Nick Lidstrom's balls.

But if he does look tenative about the situation in that photoshoot, it's probably because the author of the second article I linked is there behind the camera, drooling.

Go Wings.

I got detained at the border for telling the customs agent I was heading to Toronto to kill a man

2010-01-18T11:39:00.007-05:00

We were planning to postpone the post about the Dallas game until after the Chicago game in hopes that we would have something more substantial and pleasant to write than:

"Grumble grumble argh complain... I hate Steve Ott... grumble rant... NHL officiating... ugh bad photoshop complain... suck it, Toronto... vomit."

Well, after the game against Chicago, the only substantial thing we can do is take that and add:

"argh... 20 cent... why, Marian?... vomit more."

The Wings lost two games in two days, both decided by a shootout. And while they were painful to watch as a Wings fan, I can't say that I wasn't at least entertained.

Who knew Bertuzzi had that in him?

Yeah they damn well better have won that game

2010-01-14T23:22:00.009-05:00

That game was far from perfect. But it was the closest the Wings have come to it in weeks, and I'm not going to argue with 2 points.

With 2 points, I'm going to dance around the house jubilantly, like it was a playoff game or something. Except it's January, so that's kind of sad.

I guess the big news of the night (because I refuse to consider the Red Wings winning a game in a decisive fashion "news") is Nick Lidstrom scoring his first goal since practically his rookie season. Talk about getting a giant-ass monkey off your back.

No, not a giant ass-monkey

Also, did anybody else catch Mickey Redmond calling Jimmy "King James" tonight? Yeah, I'm still undecided on whether I want that one to catch on.

You can thank (blame?) the photoshop on the abysmally long time it took for me to load the gorilla picture on dial-up.

Let There Be Vikings.

2010-01-14T13:52:00.006-05:00

If you haven't already heard, Jonathan Ericsson will return from a knee injury tonight against the Hurricanes. With this, the Wing's Swede count increases to three. THREE. I remember a time long, long ago when Detroit had seven Swedes on the roster...

...Oh wait, what was that? Seven? Really? This season? You mean 2009-10?

Yeah. There was a time when the red and white of the Winged Wheel and the blue and yellow of Sweden's flag were practically synonymous. I miss those days.

Speaking of international hockey, a couple days ago it was released that Brian Rafalski was named alternate captain America.

He's a defenseman, so the bulletproof shield is used to... stop pucks... or something... I don't know. There was a point in my life when I was on MS Paint, meticulously cutting around a Red Wing player's head, pixel by pixel, so I could copy/paste it onto a comic book character's body, and it occurred to me that I probably shouldn't think far enough into these things to actually come up with backstory for what Alternate Captain American Brian Rafalski uses his superhero paraphernalia for.

Sadly, that day predates this blog by about two years.

Who else felt like the US Olympic roster was subtitled "let's see how many current/former New Jersey Devils we can fit on one team"? There were less Swedish Wings in Torino.

Which brings me back to the whole point of this post, which was supposed to be: I miss our Swedes.

Dear Sweet Beautiful Hockey Gods...

2010-01-12T21:22:00.007-05:00

When will the shutouts end?

Dwayne Roloson made 16 saves (Yep, just 16. Don't vomit too much) to blank the Wings in the final game of 2010's first road trip. But don't blame it all on the goalie - tonight the Wings were ridiculously out-played.

The first period looked like someone had spiked the gatorade bottles with NyQuil. Double-shots of Viking-strength NyQuil. I wrote it off as jet-lag and hoped they'd snap out of it once they realized they were down two goals at first intermission. I guess somewhere during the win-streak I had forgotten that hope breeds disappointment.

After Babcock pulled Larry Murphy's vote for Calder Trophy winner in the second period, Ozzie finally got some time in net. And boy, did he look rusty. Rusty like the Titanic.

A fitting metaphor for what the Wings did this evening when they hit the ice

That was to be expected though, considering that it's the first time he's played in about ten thousand years (actually, I think he did pretty good for being 36 and coming in more or less cold).

For a minute there, I thought that pulling Howard was the wake-up call that the Red Wings needed, and was going to be the turning point in a come-from-behind win.

And then the Islanders scored while our 4-time Lady Byng winner was in the box for trying to break a guy in half, and I pretty much gave up. Which is what it looked like half the team had done as well; the third period played out less like an attempt to break a shut-out and more like an exercise in damage control. I guess without a period-long concerted effort for either, neither plan pulled through.

As far back as I can remember, scoring goals has never been this big of a problem for the Wings, and this is starting to scare me.

On the bright side, Franzen is skating again and Kronner's ultrasound came back with no signs of a baby, and, maybe more importantly, no signs of damage to his knee.

Ugh. Six-nothing. I'm never watching hockey again.

... until Thursday.

TAVARES!!!

2010-01-11T18:22:00.004-05:00

Every time I sit down in front of this blog, I have to fight against the instinct to bang my head against the keyboard and bitch about what a crappy season it's been. (Also, now that every other word out of Larry Murphy's mouth is "Calder candidate", I have to fight against titling every post "I liked Jimmy Howard before he was cool".)

At least the injuries seem to have leveled off for the time being. Of course, now that I've said that, we're going to lose half the team...

Tomorrow the Wings are playing the New York Islanders. And you kids know what that means.

That means Tavares:

Oh man, John Tavares's new nickname in this household is totally "Pooch".

Mostly because Butch, Chubby, Tiny or Ralph just don't suit him at all.

Don't worry. We weren't killed, kidnapped, or kicked off the bandwagon

2010-01-06T01:14:00.007-05:00

We got to watch the last couple of games on swanky big-screen tvs with decent sound-systems this week. Of course, this is due to the fact that we're babysitting our aunt's cat. Who who does his business in a Red Wings-themed bonus room I could only dream of having. Underneath a picture of Sergei Fedorov, which I mention only because I don't think I could use the bathroom while I was looking at Sergei Fedorov. That just seems awkward.

But as awful as this sounds, I don't really want to talk about the Red Wings right now. And here's why:

It's not really a secret to the people who know me that I have a hard time relating to the United States as an institution. It has to do with the fact that, being such a huge and hugely diverse country, there's room in the definition of 'American' for everything and everything's exact opposite, and it always seems to be the people opposite of me who try to speak for me on behalf of the entire country. It means that for most of my life, there's been a disconnect between me and my native land, with nothing for me to really hold onto. That, and the fact that I only live about twenty minutes from the border and spent a solid quarter of my childhood across it, meant that I would have been pretty happy with the Canadians winning World Juniors tonight.

But it was the US in overtime, after a spectacular, fast-paced game of amazingness, and when the team sang the Star Spangled Banner (horribly, but it was awesome), I had something in this country to connect to, and I felt more like an American than I probably ever had. I'd hardly heard of any of those guys before New Year's eve, but they felt like my team. I was a bundle of emotions.

And then I had to turn back to the Wings game, which after that sort of felt like a regular season game played on California ice against one of my least favorite teams where I don't even get to make fun of Chris Pronger and half my team was injured and we weren't in the playoffs if they started today and the Wings were down two goals half-way through the second and I could scream "WELL IF TODD BERTUZZI AND TOMAS HOLMSTROM CAN'T SCORE ON HILLER TONIGHT THEN THIS GAME IS ALREADY OVER" at the television and not be sarcastic at all.

Because... that's what it was.

And given my choice between the two, I'd much rather be thinking about the badassery that is the World Juniors Battle Cry. (No, seriously, you should watch that.)

(ETA: Apparently this victory was just important enough to be featured on ESPN's website until the next blurb of football news came up, when it disappeared forever. So nevermind, I hate America again.)

Even our aunt loves Todd Bertuzzi

2009-12-27T14:17:00.003-05:00

No, really. I mean, at first it was sort of cute, you know, like aw, our crazy lady aunt has a crush on Todd!, but then he started scoring every goal in the game again, and no, my aunt loves Todd Bertuzzi.

Like, when they interviewed him in postgame it was "Shhh, my boyfriend's talking! Isn't he cute!" And our aunt's not the cool aunt who's only seven years older than you are. She's like your mom. I mean, I never understood those people who would melt from embarassment over their mothers having gushing crushes on George Clooney, but I get it now. I definitely get it now.

Not that I can really blame her - admit it: if Todd Bertuzzi keeps being the only Red Wing who can consistently win us games, you'll be in love with him before too long too.

By the end of that game, I wanted to say that it was the greatest game in the history of the franchise, but that's only because it feels like it's been three years since the Wings have walked away with a point. In actuality, that was pretty gross, but I'd rather the team win gross games than lose at all.

- Howard was pretty good from where I was sitting. I understand going with the hot goalie, but Ozzie's four wins away from 400, and as happy as I am with Jimmy's performance, I want him to make there. He's been my favorite forever; it makes me sad.

- No, seriously - holy crap Todd Bertuzzi. I don't even know what's going on.

- I could bitch about the first period, but if the Red Wings are going to spend a third of each game sleeping, I would much prefer they choose the first and not the third. I miss the days when the Wings would mount a spectacular win and I would sit down at the computer and complain for three paragraphs about defensive coverage and lack of secondary scoring. I like that better than lamenting the end of the universe because they played alright and lost.

- I watched every replay of Helm's save, but I'm still not sure how he did it. I think he must have been moving faster than the cameras could pick up.

Do we really have to watch the BJs again? Twice in a row? This schedule is janky.

So because two games in a row against Chicago makes me sad, I'm not going to talk about it.

2009-12-22T22:04:00.004-05:00

I'm going to talk about other things I hate.

About a week ago, Lindsay found this post on her internet travels. It sparked a little discussion (and a lot of ranting) about what makes a truly obnoxious seat-mate. It's all pretty subjective - some of our death-by-fire game-ruiners might be your colorful ambiance-providers and vice versa. Hell, we couldn't even agree on most of these, and only agreed to include them all because they managed to add up to ten, which is generally the most accepted number of items to put on one of these things. You're probably going to disagree with a few of these.

So with that in mind, here are Hockeytown Static's Top Ten Most Obnoxious People at a Hockey Game:

10. People with whistles. Actually, neither of us have ever been to a hockey game where they were blowing train whistles (which is probably a good thing for the people blowing them), but it's a fear we have for the future.

9. Puckbunnies. Ok, so we're girls - we understand if you want to look good when you go out, even to a hockey game. And we understand if you appreciate the physical attractiveness of the players on the ice - that's biology. Hell, I guess we can even concede to tolerate all the "PUCK ME" and "Lebda your (sic) a hottie!" signs, even if it means that, again, us being girls, among a lot of fans we have to work twice as hard and dress twice as frumpily to prove our credibility.

But when I'm glowing with childlike glee at finally getting a chance to see the players I worshiped as heroes as a child and you push past me and block my view of Lidstrom or Hank or Ozzie during warm-ups so that you can try to slip Jonathan Ericsson your number through the crack in the glass? Bitch, you've crossed a line.

8. The Griffins $1 beer crowd. I've never really had a problem with the people at Van Andel who were there for the hockey and really excited that the beer was just a buck (actually, the best time I've ever had at a hockey game was when the guys in front of us got wasted and two of them nearly went to blows over whether or not Wayne Gretzky was the greatest hockey player of all time). But the arena fills up every Friday night, mainly with people just there to get drunk. They're loud, obnoxious, and usually have no idea what a puck even is, but they can get wasted and eat a whole meal for under $20 (including tickets), so they're there. And while I think it's great that you're having a good time and all, I don't really want to spill beer on me, hit on my sister during second intermission, and then cheer for the wrong team during the shootout.

7. People who stand during THE WHOLE intermission. Not get up and stretch a little. Not head out to the concourse to pee out five dollars worth of dollar beer and then come back a little while later. Not jump up when there's a chance to catch free t-shirts. People who actually stand up right in front of their seats and chat for a solid 15 minutes. I know the intermission entertainment is lame. I don't care. Maybe my kid's out there with his mini-mites team. Maybe my best friend's trying to throw frisbees into the net for a free jersey. Maybe I've got a thing for juggling Elvises. And maybe I paid good money for my $10 standing room only ticket and want to watch the Stormtroopers dance. Sit the hell down, dammit.

6. People who wear jerseys of teams not playing in the game you are attending. We understand that there can be exceptions - like teams that have some kind of personal or geographical tie to one of the teams playing (like wearing a team Sweden or an old Vipers jersey to a Wings game, or a Shane Doan Jets jersey to a Coyotes game), or like a Chiefs jersey (which no hockey game is really complete without). But if you go to a Wings vs. Flames game in Detroit wearing a Crosby 2010 Olympic Team Canada jersey, you are just a prognosticating tool. The roster hasn't even been finalized yet, and obviously you're just doing it to brag, but you've come to the wrong place.

5. That one guy who steals the goal light after the final game at Olympia and makes it into an honest to God lamp. Then they give the lamp away, with no thought at all that maybe in a few years they would have two daughters who pretty much worship the Detroit Red Wings. Thanks, Dad.

4. Grown adults who are at their first hockey game and still don't quite get it. I appreciate your effort sir, but I don't want to sit next to you for three hours while you tell your friend (and their friends are never all that knowledgeable about the game) how it's like football on ice. No, it's not. It's like soccer on crack on ice. But you don't know that, because you don't watch soccer either. And I'm talking about the people who aren't ever going to watch hockey again, who spend third period on their cell phones because they got bored of not being able to follow the puck. You're not obnoxious because you don't know what icing is - you're obnoxious because you're yelling over the hockey-noise, right in my ear, about how you totally almost scored the other night with some hot chick.

3. That guy who spends literally the entire game standing two rows in front of you on his cell phone trying to get the attention of his friend on the other side of the arena. Ok, cool - make sure your buddy knows where you're sitting, have a wave, point him out to the guy you're sitting with - if you can't find each other in less than five actual minutes, give up, because you're not going to pick each other out among the other 8,000 people at Joe Louis Arena wearing red shirts and black baseball caps, half of whom are on their cell phones waving across the ice right along with you. And you don't need to continuously stand up and signal to each other via semaphore during actual game play - cross-arena communication is what the Finns invented texting for. Don't make me spend the entire game with your arms waving around my line of vision, listening to you say "No, over here! Yeah, I'm over here, in section...um... the one like two down from the left goal. No, MY left. Yeah. No, that's not me. I'm waving! Can you see me? Where are you?"

2. People who get drunk enough to fail at insulting the players so epically that I almost don't hate them, but love them for the entertainment. Most of this I've experienced thanks to dollar beer night at Van Andel (why would you yell 'GO BACK TO STATE!' at Jimmy Howard? He went to University of Maine), and is part of the reason I don't like the people who only come for the dollar beers. Can you tell that dollar beer night is a complicated love-hate relationship for me? It confuses my emotions toward alcohol.

1. People who yell "SHOOT!" when there is clearly no shooting lane open. I mean, I get it - it's frustrating when you're stuck watching your team pass the puck to each other at the blue line during a powerplay in the last dying seconds of the game. And sometimes hockey players don't do enough getting the puck to the net (back when he was with the Griffins, Ville Leino, I swear to God, would back-pass on a breakaway. I saw it happen! More than once!) and you want them to shoot - I want them to shoot too. Maybe enough to shout a little encouragement every once in a while. But I can promise you that Nick Lidstrom has a better idea of when to shoot the puck than that drunk guy sitting three rows behind me. So drunk guy three rows behind me yelling "SHOOT IT!" every thirty seconds? Unless your name is Steven Gregory Yzerman, and I know it's not, keep your freaking mouth shut.

Good lord, hockey makes me angry.

blegh

2009-12-21T00:18:00.005-05:00

Well, that was a depressing weekend. The Wings lost all 4 of the possible points they could have skated away with in two games against Dallas and Chicago.

I honestly stopped paying attention during the third period of the game against Chicago. I don't know if it was just the game, or it was a combination of the game and the season, or if it was all of that and this wicked caffiene headache (lack of caffiene headache?) I've been nursing most of the day, but at some point around second intermission, I had lost the will to live. The Wings were playing that way too. The defensive coverage was bad, the goaltending was questionable, and the offense was so horrible that it was nonexistant.

On the bright side, there's only about 50 more days until Franzen comes back.
(I might have just vomited on my keyboard after typing that. I don't think I can handle this season anymore. It's just too ridiculous.)

Why am I blaming everything on voodoo this year?

2009-12-18T22:46:00.005-05:00

Top five reasons why the Hockeytown No Limits commercial might be cursed:

5. It's not actually cursed, because Franzen and Williams weren't in it, and Kronner only in a highly diminished capacity - but Mattias Ritola and Jakub Kindl have been holding voodoo doll parties in Grand Rapids.

4. Steve Yzerman should have been in it.

3. Allowing the universal spread of the "Hockeytown" moniker, while only fair to faraway Wings fans, has spread the magic too thin.

2. Tempting fate - "No limits? Lets give them some!"

1. The director was actually an Avs fan.

Babcock better be glad it's not the same curse as last year, when every team that went to Europe to start the season had a different coach by the end of it.

Why are there two hockey teams in Florida anyway?

2009-12-17T15:43:00.004-05:00

Tonight's ugly sweater night at the Joe!

Trying to find the ugliest sweater in hockey led me to some very dark places. The Vancouver Canucks of the 1970s. Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Nabokov. Henrik Zetterberg's penchant for wearing questionable sweater vests to press conferences.

But the winner, as with most things, has to be Steve Yzerman.

yeah, you wish your sweaters were as ugly as his

As for the game... to tell you the truth, I'm not overly fond of Tampa Bay in the first place, since (with maybe the exception of Nikolai Khabibulin (although, who knows what sort of crippling personal issues he might have walked away with)) that team seems to eventually destroy everything it touches. The Vipers... Gary Roberts' career... Vinny Lecavalier and Brad Richards' guy-love... to the point where I blame them for causing the lock-out by winning the Cup in 04.

Of course I want the Red Wings to win this one. They haven't won four in a row yet this season, and not only would it probably be a confidence thing for the team, it would make me feel better about life.

But to be perfectly honest, I'm more worried about winning the next six. It's the Tampa Bay Lightning - I'll get over it if the Wings lose. I care more about beating Dallas, Chicago twice, Columbus twice, and Colorado.

Ugh, happy holidays. Who the crap is responsible for this schedule bullshit?

It's about damn time

2009-12-17T00:22:00.007-05:00

We updated our links. Don't be offended if you're toward the bottom - I organized it by length of blog name (and it still bothers me that it looks like we need somebody between Babcock's Death Stare and Nightmare on Helm Street. I tried to fix that problem, but I ended up with what looked like a boob with Snipe Snipe Dangle Dangle as the nipple. That plan got the axe pretty fast). Yes, it has occurred to me that I might have some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Among the new highlights:
- I'm not actually sure how The Triple Deke, SS,DD, and Babcock's Death Stare (and probably a couple others) didn't make it on here the first time we put links up, because I actually thought they were already here. Strange.
- Fight Night at the Joe - because Norwegians are kind of awesome
- The Winged Wheel has winged wheel-shaped bullet points, which is pretty badass
- The Obstructed View isn't a blog so much as it is a podcast, and definitely worth a listen

If you think we forgot you, chew us out about it in the comments.

(Oh, and for those of you who follow us on Twitter - our tweets will be restricted for the next three weeks. We have dial-up internet, a single phone line, and a mother with a serious addiction to free Zuma on aol games. Yay Christmas break.)

Rejoice - The Wings Have Won!

2009-12-15T00:01:00.007-05:00

And then despair because this team seriously can't play a game without somebody limping out early.

when we've cleared out all the Griffins, do we hit the Walleye next?

If the last few games are any indications, Thursday against Tampa Bay is going to involve Brad May scoring a hat trick and at least one player leaving the ice unable to return. I'm not making a guess on which one - I've already lost $10 on Darren Helm this week.

Anyway, it probably angers the hockey gods to bet on player injuries. Andreas Lilja technically won me fifteen dollars last season, but Lindsay refuses to pay up until it's been determined that my winning the bet didn't actually end his career.

Some thoughts on tonight's game:
- My mom spent every second of Kris Newbury's first penalty berating him like a child about doing stupid things his first few seconds on the ice, but when he came out of the box and scored out of nowhere, she got real quiet, real fast.

- Actually, I like Kris Newbury taking penalties if they're all going to result, directly or indirectly, in the Red Wings scoring. I hope Babs sends him out there every shift with the order to hook, trip, grab, slash, and hold everything that moves.

- If you want a cheap laugh, remember what Kris Newbury's face looks like in real life, when he was skating around tonight, and then take a gander at his Griffins roster pic. I mean, he looks better than the in-game picture in person to begin with. The roster pic... he must have insulted that camera's mother. And I know I'm not imagining it, because I overheard two 12 year old boys having a serious conversation about it at a Griffins game.

- I don't really want to think about Jonathan Ericsson right now. At the end of the game, the announcers were hoping it would just be a contusion, but Lindsay saw Mike Serven's (via twitter: @mserven) frame-by-frame of the moment of impact and said it looked pretty bad.

But we got two points! (in regulation, even) so for now I'm happy.

Todd Bertuzzi is as awesome as college is not

2009-12-12T22:36:00.009-05:00

I don't actually know if I have words right now for my feelings toward Todd Bertuzzi. Which is unfortunate, because the end of that game was really the only part I remember now. (That and the pukey feeling I got every time I saw somebody go down, since we're pretty much out of bodies right now.) Bertuzzi's surprise repeat awesomeness has overpowered my short-term memory banks.

I do have words for Grand Valley's inability to pick up FS+, stranding me with the Nashville feed on the internet. Most of them I tend to avoid in polite company. Some of you may remember that this is not the first time I have subjected myself to this torture. Tonight was no improvement.

First of all, the Predators are having a mustache contest for prostate awareness. That's right. They're growing porno-tastic facial-hair to encourage men to let complete strangers shove their cold fingers... I mean, I'm all for prostate health, but really, Nashville? Really?

What's more, instead of Red Wings player of the game updates, I was encouraged to vote for my favorite Pred-stache (which is now my new replacement word for "pedo-stache". Even the hockey-ignorant will get the joke).

*gagging noises...*

Alright Bubba, I'll bite. My vote was for Dan Hamhuis because his looks the most well-groomed.

Sadly, my vote counted for nothing, as J.P. Dumont won the contest by a landslide.

I wonder what his prize is. Maybe a free prostate exam...

It turns out that the announcers in Nashville couldn't believe that Bertuzzi had actually saved the game a second night in a row either, since they seemed pretty sure that Zetterberg had scored the goal, but the screams of "HOLY CRAP! HOLY CRAP, TODD, ARE YOU KIDDING ME, OH MY GOD BERTUZZI WHAT THE CRAP!" that were coming from my phone sounded surer than they did.

Let's revisit that moment again, shall we?

Ah... beautiful.

And it was Chris Osgood's 396th career win, which took him 5 weeks to get. Good lord.

Even your mom loves Todd Bertuzzi

2009-12-12T14:17:00.008-05:00

Be honest - none of you expected last night's game from Todd Bertuzzi at the beginning of the season. I didn't even expect that from Todd Bertuzzi, and I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt all season.

And what do you do to the guy who just threw your NHL win-count into double-digits? You make him eat your catching glove. We noticed in Grand Rapids that Jimmy was particularly fond of joining goal celebrations, going so far as to skate out to center ice with his arm out hoping that somebody would notice him and give a little love. But even for him, that was a little epic.

There's a running bet between me and my sister (that will probably never be resolved) about why Ozzie wasn't in net. She thinks it's because of his strange and highly vocal love of playing against Nashville.

I think he was in mourning for Tiger Woods' hiatus from golf and was emotionally unable to play.

I love him but he's like a child.

So despite having been performed on a player that already had an injury, I'm calling the voodoo a success. Now all I have to do is find a Martin Erat card and a box of matches, and tonight's game is in the bag.

Because we're playing Nashville again tonight. Train whistles ahoy.

This is a gross season.

2009-12-11T12:58:00.006-05:00

You never want to use injuries as an excuse for losing games (in fact, you see hockey players yelling at members of the media for trying to), because good teams find ways around adversity.

At the same time, no amount of yelling on Kris Draper's part is going to bring back Dan Cleary any sooner.

I looked down the Wing's roster today at all the little marks for day-to-day and IR, and if it hadn't been this season's Red Wings I was looking at, I would have laughed until I peed. The only reason I'm not calling injury bullshit on the universe is that, to my knowledge, none of them involved banana peels, sexual escapades, extended chase sequences, or any other three-stooges-type comical accident. So maybe that's where you'll find consolation - the team's just unlucky, they're not actually cursed.

Or maybe they are. Maybe some psychopath Blackhawks fan bought a bunch of Red Wing hockey cards, tied them up with black thread, knotted it seven times, wished a wish of fail over it and stuck it in their freezer (which I have totally never done to the Penguins during the finals).

Yeah, so that's the story I'm going with. "Trisha, can you explain the Wings' lack of offense and responsible defensive coverage against everybody and their mom this season?"

"Voodoo."

Immediate counter-measures are already underway.

A recap of things you probably already know

2009-12-09T18:41:00.004-05:00

Tonight the Wings take on the Blues, in what I'm assuming will be a painfully empty Joe Louis Arena. About three hours ago I got a text practically begging me to buy student rush tickets (if I were home, you better believe I would be there), and rumor has it that only around 12,000 tickets have been sold for this game. If the weather in Detroit is anything like it is up here in the Grand Rapids area, I'm assuming that it's playing a pretty big role in this, but it still worries me.

-As I'm sure you've all heard unless you've been living under a rock, Darren McCarty has officially announced his retirement. Snapshots has a nice compilation of teammate's thoughts on this here.

-On a happy note, Valtter Filppula got the cast on his arm removed, and is on the road to return later this month.

-Ken Holland and Mike Babcock once again won the team competition to raise the most money for the Salvation Army yesterday. Anyone else smell cheating here?

Anyway, hopefully this game will be better than the Sweden games against St. Louis, and the Wings can come out of it with a full two points.

A three point weekend that could have been worse

2009-12-07T13:18:00.007-05:00

Normally when there's back-to-back games and this blog only covers the second game, it's out of laziness. This time it's out of the fact that I was at a Griffins game and Lindsay was at a dance recital.

And from what I've heard, all I would have had to say about the New Jersey game was "It must have been an improvement from the last one because the Wings got a point and didn't score any goals on themselves".

Oh hey, check that out. It's like we just covered the first game.

On to games the Red Wings have actually won

Some thoughts on last night's win:

- Ugh, that ice was awful. I am so grateful the Pistons are at the Palace.

- Speaking of which, those intermission highlights of the Pistons game were starting to give me disconcerting flashbacks to Vipers games I thought I didn't remember.

- BRENDAN SHANAHAN. Once upon a time, there was a little girl who really loved the Red Wings. A few of them in particular she loved more than others, and among these was one named Brendan Shanahan. He had been constructed out of imported Irish awesomeness and filled with 500 metric shit-tons of 80 carat win. After three lifetimes of playing for the Red Wings, Brendan Shanahan walked off into the night, never to be heard from again. This made the little girl very sad. Until one day, he gave an interview during second intermission of a game between the Red Wings and the Rangers where he looked out from the tv screen and said "thank you Detroit", and it filled the little girl with such diabetically syrup-thick sugary joy that she almost cried.

And guys? That little girl was me.

- If the neighbors weren't wondering about the state of my mental health before, they probably are now after the save on that penalty shot caused me to loudly profess my undying love for Jimmy Howard.

- Hypothetical situation - Sean Avery and Henrik Zetterberg go into a corner. Who comes out with a penalty? Because before last night I would not have said Henrik Zetterberg. I give Sean a solid 7.5 on that dive, though. For a second there, I almost bought it.

- Does Kris Draper hold the record for most empty-net goals in franchise history? If he doesn't, I'd like to know who the hell does.

You know, I think I like this whole "winning games" business. The Wings should do it more often.

Do you know what that was?

2009-12-04T00:56:00.006-05:00

At least they won't smell out of place when they head out to New Jersey this weekend.

Get it? Because the whole state smells like burning garbage. I'm making fun of people to make myself feel better. It's working.

Trying to go for three in a row

2009-12-03T14:21:00.005-05:00

Tonight we're going to see a match-up of two teams limping through injuries.

For the Red Wings, this means limping harder than last time, because Brian Rafalski's out with... a worrysome back.

In his place, Wings have called up Griffins blueliner Jakub Kindl. Say hi to the people, Jakub.

huh?

Last season he had 6 goals and 27 assists in Grand Rapids. He is two hundred and ten pounds of pure unadulterated awesomeness*.

*Actual purity of awesomeness will vary. Contents may settle during shipping.

He's been pretty good with the Griffins the last few years, and I'm excited that he's getting his shot, but... I'd be more excited if the Wings had less injuries and more wins on the season.

The Oilers are at 9-14-4 right now, unless I utterly fail at counting, but assuming your team is going to beat someone just because they've won more games so far is setting yourself up to weep bitter tears of anguish into your pillow at night. The Wings lost their last game against Edmonton in a come-from-behind-to-toy-with-your-emotions shootout which took place at approximately four in the morning eastern standard time. I think Darren Helm scored his first regular season goal that night, even though CBC still hasn't recognized him for it in their Kia Fantasy Pool (stop being dicks, you guys, I saw it happen).

And unless Mike Babcock's been changing his mind last minute again (what? no, that never happens...), it'll be Howard in net again tonight.

Let the ridiculousness commence. Go Wings.

That's more like it

2009-12-01T12:44:00.003-05:00

I want more games like that one. More games where my biggest complaint is that most of the goals scored were deflections and strange bounces, so we didn't get to see Datsyuk deke the shit out of Turco. Again. And again and again. Actually, someday I plan on compiling a video collection of The Detroit Red Wings Making Marty Turco Look Foolish and burning it to dvd. Oh man, I would watch that everyday.

Someday Marty Turco is going to have a nervous breakdown, come to Detroit, and try to set Joe Louis Arena aflame. You'll see it on the news, and tell your children I remember; I was there.

Sweet Swedish retribution

2009-11-30T15:38:00.005-05:00

The St. Louis game put us in a position where, for the first time either of us could remember, so long as no Red Wings left the ice dead or injured, or as long as they scored a single goal (that counted), we would be satisfied.

The realization that this was the point to which the season had sunken our spirits sort of made me want to throw up a little in my mouth.

Watching Todd Bertuzzi skate out on the ice to take the shootout made me want to throw up a lot in my mouth, and the awful sound of the puck hitting the post that I 100% expected to hear still sort of haunts my nightmares (and I actually like Todd Bertuzzi, so I don't want to imagine how horrible that moment must have been for the haters) even though he actually got the puck in the back of the net and I danced around the living room in happiness.

The Wings are still gunning for a home ice being-shut-out record of like ten thousand minutes though.

I'd post something relevant about tonight's game against the Dallas Stars, but all I have is a rant about how I want the Eurotwins back on a line together and a picture of Marty Turco shirtless. I'll post either upon sufficient request.

But if there's sufficient request for naked Turco, I might have to retire from blogging forever.

ajsldfjsldfjlsdfjls

2009-11-28T00:39:00.003-05:00

Two games. 80 shots on net. No goals. The first double shutout since 1977.

What.

The.

Crap.

Maybe I should have been a little more specific when I said that I wanted to witness Red Wings history when I attended the only two games I was going to get to attend in probably two years.

I'm not really sure how this makes me feel. I don't know if I want to be angry, or if I want to laugh, or if I want to throw myself off the ambassador bridge, or maybe I want to do all three. I had the urge to do all three today, but I don't think jumping off a bridge while laughing angrily at hockey is quite the way I want to go. But I don't even have anything relevant to say about the game yet, except that it was ridiculous. I'm sort of too in shock right now at it having happened in the first place to form an opinion about it.

Seriously, what was that?

Remember how Lindsay wanted to corner Jarome Iginla in an elevator and give him a swift kick in the shins for his team's past transgressions before tonight's game? Her blind hatred of the Calgary Flames has now crossed over into the realm of the comedic. I've spent most of the night whispering "Dion Phaneuf" from across the room and watching her face spasm with disgust.

It's funny in the same way that disallowed goals aren't.

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T12:41:00.003-05:00

While I agree that the Wings could have played that game with a little more jump and eagerness, you can’t fault them for a lack of effort. 40 shots on goal and not a single one in Atlanta’s net? That Pavelec kid was kind of ridiculous, and I’m sure the save he made in the second period will be on all the week’s highlight reels.

This being Thanksgiving (unless you’re in Canada, then this being Thursday), here is a list of things I am thankful for:

-That at least nobody got injured in that game
-Henrik Zetterberg
-The infinite classiness of Wings fans, who gave a pretty earnest clap for Slava Kozlov’s second period goal
-East side accents. I know you have no idea what I’m talking about, because you can’t hear them, but trust me – milling around a building full of locals going ‘hockey’ this and ‘pop’ that after having spent the last four weeks up in the Grand Rapids area? It was heaven.

But this whole not winning thing? Sort of beginning to become an issue. Those two goals Jimmy let in last night could have been the softest two goals ever to have been scored in the National Hockey League, and I’d still have trouble faulting him for the loss because you sort of have to score at least once to win a game.

Yeah. Yeah, the Red Wings got shut out by the Atlanta Thrashers. The good news is that when you’re done puking about that, you’ll have more room for turkey.

At least we got to see Darren McCarty?

2009-11-24T15:25:00.004-05:00

There's not really much to say about last night's game. The penalty kill sucked, Brian Engblom's hair sucked, the final score sucked, and as usual in Nashville, the fans sucked. Or I guess maybe they blew. Because god forbid Jordin Tootoo take a shift without the world being alterted. If I ever find myself in Nashville, I am marching into the Sommet Center with a jug of lighter fluid and a match, and burning everyone's train whistles. In a big, giant train whistle bonfire.

(yeah you best view that shit full-sized.)

I literally watched half the game on mute so I didn't have to listen to it. But the final fwa-eeeeet that they'd all make together as the superheated air of the whistle-fire blew through them? Would be worth hearing.

Also, after martin Erat's hat trick--- oh wait, he only scored two goals? So it wasn't a hat trick then? Well that's good to know. I guess I got a little confused from there having been more hats thrown on the ice for him than there were after Teemu Selanne's actual hat tick against the Wings last season in Anaheim. Maybe they just thought three goals for one team in a game or three points for one player in a game was a hat trick. That's an honest mistake that anyone could make.

I feel bad for the 8 or 10 Nashville fans that actually like hockey.

And things go from bad to good to worse

2009-11-21T23:28:00.005-05:00

Well, the Wings managed to come out of that game with two points after giving up a 2-0 lead and forcing it to a shootout, which was sort of awesome because lately I just expect a ridiculous loss every time they step out onto the ice (it's hard to be disappointed when you keep expectations low). It was really nice seeing the Eurotwins back in their usual form. More importantly though, they came out of it with only five defensemen.

According to the Detroit Free Press, Kronwall will be out a minimum of two weeks with a sprained MCL. Wonderful.

This is the sort of thing where I'm not exactly sure where my opinion lies. On the one hand, the homer in me wants to call Ultimate Foul, ban Laraque from the league and put the Wings on the man advantage the full 60 minutes of our next eight games.

And then, rationally speaking, I don't really think there was any intent to injure, at least not injure seriously - hockey is by nature a dangerous game of centimeters and sometimes millimeters, where huge men go barreling across giant sheets of ice with knives strapped to their feet, knocking into each other at high speed, and not everyone can always pay attention to where every part of everyone else's body is at any given time, let alone the sticks they all carry, or the little fleck of rubber they send at each other in occasional excess of 100mph - unfortunate accidents happen (especially this season, it seems). And part of me is willing to just let this one go as an unfortunate accident. I don't really care if Laroque gets a suspension - I just want Kronner back.

Still. He didn't have to stick his leg out. He'd already just knocked Helm in the teeth - he didn't need to try to trip anyone. And now we're out another guy, for god only knows how long. Ugh. Laraque. You unclassy, whorish bastard. How dare you.

At least he's not out four months. I guess.

Puketastical (Link Updated)

2009-11-20T22:04:00.005-05:00

I know that all signs point to this season being back-weighted on wins - surely we'll get more production when Filppula and Franzen come back from injuryland - but right now the statistics say that the Wings are on track to win 41 games this season.

And I'd really like them to aim a little higher than that.

The really frustrating thing is that they're not playing like complete shit in every game they lose, but they're losing them anyway. I feel like beating my head against a wall.

But I'm not allowed to hit walls on purpose. I crack enough drywall unintentionally.

To distract yourselves, go read an article about hat tricks and curly fries that yours truly was interviewed for.

Just your average referee rant

2009-11-18T21:27:00.007-05:00

Well that was pukey. The Wings lost to the Stars 3-1, and as I'm sure all you who watched the game are aware, the score should have been 3-2.

Play whistled down? Intent to blow the whistle? Really? It took him over two seconds to raise his hand to his mouth? I don't even know. I could put some of the blame on Toronto for being lame, but I'm not. I'm putting it on Dennis LaRue. I will always put it on Dennis LaRue, because it's always his fault. Trisha said it best back in May:

"I hate Dennis LaRue. Every time I see a tiny man skate onto the ice wearing a striped jersey with a number 14 on the back, my stomach drops because I know I’m about to sit through at least sixty minutes of ridiculousness. I hate it. There are some refs in this league I give second chances to, allow occasional mistakes from, try to forgive a little even if I can’t forget (because we’re all human) – but Dennis LaRue is not one of those refs. I want to get him alone in an elevator so I can kick him in the shins more than I do Jarome Iginla."

As you can see, there's not much love going around Hockeytown Static for that man.

Besides that outrage, this game put back a lot of the worries that I had in the beginning of the season back in my head. It's not that this game was extraordinarily bad, but the Wings just didn't seem to have the same drive that they've had for the last few games. Maybe I'll just forget this game ever happened...

But at least I got to watch the game. Our dad is in Texas for a couple of day on a business trip, and he was happy the Wings were playing the Stars because then he would be able to still see the game. So he went back to his hotel room, and there was no game. Then he went to TGI Friday's, and still no game. Finally he went to a bar and asked the bartender if he could turn on one of the T.V.s to the game, and the bartender responded "Sorry but we don't have it. We don't watch a lot of hockey in Texas". I can't decide if this is funny or sad. Maybe it's both. Here's to hoping Friday's game against Florida is less painful to watch.

And they were the most delicious curly fries I have ever eaten

2009-11-17T00:05:00.004-05:00

I almost thought the Arby's Curse truly existed. I remember reading somewhere that last season was the Wings' first hat-trick-less season since sometime in the mid-70s. Craziness.

Also craziness - Chris Osgood still has... whatever it is he's got. I don't know why fate is constantly conspiring to keep Ozzie a backup goalie.

And we're playing Dallas on Wednesday. A game against Dallas can get real ugly, real fast, even without a rookie goalie and a team riddled with injuries and illness. Especially now that Marty Turco thinks he can just waltz into Joe Louis Arena and win games.

Which is why we've sent our father, who's in Texas this week on business, on a secret undercover mission to sabotage the Dallas Stars.

So far he's had strong words with three people who look sort of like Mike Modano, and egged Steve Ott's next door neighbor's house.

We should have hired a professional.

Arby's here I come!

2009-11-14T22:05:00.010-05:00

Wings beat Anaheim 7-4 in what ended up being one of the most exciting games that I've seen in a long time. And while thankfully Chris Pronger wasn't in this game, Corey Perry and Ryan Getzlaf are starting to get to be just as annoying. They're like your annoying little cousin at Thanksgiving dinner that just won't stop poking you because they think it's funny. Well, it's not funny and neither are their constant goals against the Wings.

This game proved that while the Wings still have a long way to go this season in terms of defensive brain farts (coughJonathanEricssoncough), hitting goalposts, and taking bad penalties, the future is still looking bright. Leino looked good, Helm looked, well... fast, and Jimmy now has a mastodonic 5 NHL wins. Also tonight was the first hat trick in over a year. Not that I didn't love Hossa, but he apparently missed the memo on how to put the third puck in the net and just ended up being the ultimate roastbeef tease. Not Henrik Zetterberg. Nothing will be as sweet as walking into Arby's tomorrow holding the boxscore and asking for free potatoes. It's taken a freakishly long time, but it's here now.

Holy dear sweet Jimmy Howard

2009-11-13T21:18:00.004-05:00

Well. That was pretty much a complete 180 from every worry I was developing ulcers from.

I mean, the Columbus game was just ridiculous on a level I don't think can be explained. When my team wins by more than five goals, I don't really have much to say except "awesome". Awesome.

And as much as you never want to see your starting goaltender sick at home, Howard's play in last night's game against Vancouver quelled dozens and dozens of worries I was starting to have about his development (and gave me a few new ones to mull over concerning rebound control, but... that's for later). I can only hope that this stretch of games is the momentum change in the season and that the Wings keep picking up steam.

At the same time, I'm not sure I want to get my hopes up for the future, if only because it still seems as though the Wings are unable to deliver any awesomeness until I'm sobbing into my hands with the fear of imminent torture thinking about the next game.

I think this is the kind of cycle of joy and agony that's supposed to be indicative of an abusive relationship. Hockey is a crappy boyfriend.

So about this game on in a half an hour...

2009-11-11T18:05:00.003-05:00

Pretty much the only thing I look forward to less than the Wings playing the BJs is the Wings playing the BJs when their roster is being quickly chopped to pieces by highly contagious Random Exploding Leg Syndrome and Albertan Swine Flu.

I've sort of been in a sleep-deprivation-induced haze the last couple of days, and as such, have nothing more to say about tonight's game.

But hey, look who we just picked up on waivers. Drew Miller's just the kind of scoring touch the team really... oh. Oh, nevermind. But we can put him on the roster and only count half his salary towards the cap, right? That's how waivers work? There are three things I never really bothered to learn in high school, and the waiver system is one of them. (the other two are mathematical proofs and how to apply eyeliner without poking myself in the eye, in case you're wondering.)

Congrats Stevie

2009-11-10T00:29:00.003-05:00

This video dosen't really need any words. Steve Yzerman is practically a God to us, and now his face and legacy is forever immortalized in a little square piece of etched glass. I can't think of anyone who deserves this more. The Triple Deke and Abel to Yzerman summed up his importance in Detroit better than I could ever hope to. Read it and be amazed at all things Yzerman.

Thank you Steve, and congratulations.

I scored a goal for the Leafs tonight

2009-11-07T23:57:00.001-05:00

... didn't everyone?

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?

Aren't shootouts fun? (wherein I wax nostalgic)

2009-11-05T22:11:00.013-05:00

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 Detroit Vipers 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.

Maybe less of the team has the flu than was initially reported

2009-11-05T12:34:00.004-05:00

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.

Also, the entire team has the flu.

2009-11-03T15:04:00.004-05:00

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!

That game made me smile

2009-11-01T23:56:00.005-05:00

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.

Happy Halloween!

2009-10-31T15:23:00.010-04:00

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:

Since, as we just found out, Valtteri Filppula's pimpin' hand ain't strong.

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.

Let's put down some Flames.

Can we have another game like Tuesday?

2009-10-29T13:02:00.010-04:00

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.