This is a stressful time of year, all around

Franzen's back in for tonight. That's good, because apparently Nashville is putting Dan Ellis in net, and last season it seemed like Mule was the only one who could consistently score on him. As always, I'm hoping for the best, but expecting 60 minutes of unmitigated ridiculousness. That way, I'm never disappointed.

It's two weeks from the trade deadline, and everyone is freaking out over rumors. It's our policy at Hockeytown Static to not follow trade rumors until the trades have already been announced. In fact, if we accidentally stumble across one, we automatically assume that the exact opposite will happen. So, you know... if in a month Pavel Datsyuk's on the Penguins and Hudler's signed a 15 year contract, you heard it here first.

Actually, I'm worried about Hudler. Not that he's a shoe-in for a trade next week, or that if he ever does leave, the Red Wings won't be able to go on without him (because I'm sure they will), but that if he goes to another team, I don't think I'll be able to deal with my father.

I guess this is where I explain that my dad has the biggest man-crush on Jiri Hudler in the history of man-crushes on Jiri Hudler. His work computer background is Jiri Hudler. He uses his breaks to go online and look up pictures of Jiri Hudler. If he ever bought a jersey, the name on the back of that jersey would be Hudler. I get a phone call during games every time a goal is scored by Jiri Hudler. If asked, I'm not sure he wouldn't admit that he'd go gay for Jiri Hudler. If Steve Yzerman, Henrik Zetterberg, and Gordie Howe were hanging on the edge of a cliff and my dad could only save one, he would save Jiri Hudler.

He has a button pinned to the driver's side sun-visor in his car. This thing is about as big as your fist. Can you guess what's on it? It's not just Jiri Hudler.

It's Jiri Hudler and Jiri Hudler's REALLY BAD HAIR. I like Huds too, but this thing is terrifying. (especially in the dark, when you don't know it's there until it gets suddenly lit up by the headlights of the car behind you.)

If Jiri Hudler is ever not a Red Wing for any reason, the universe will implode. Now, I love my dad, but this year, the trade deadline is smack dab in the middle of my spring break. Do I think Hudler's getting traded? I have no idea. I am not Ken Holland. I don't pretend to know what he's thinking, which is why I try not to read trade rumors. I planned on spending the entire week asleep, but now there are no promises, and if I have to deal with my grieving, irrational father cussing out the Red Wings' front office the whole time, I might just stop watching hockey forever*.

(*this is a lie.)

So, Jiri? Do what you can to stay where you are. I don't want my father's evening news debut to be in a story titled "Crazed Man Attacks Wings GM with Baseball Bat." Although, if it is, I'll be sure to post a link to the youtube. "Yep, that's my dad. Trying to kill Ken Holland."

damn, it's late at night

I heard about tonight's game. I didn't actually get to see it. I was grocery shopping. It sounded pretty ridiculous. This whole season it's looked a little like the team as a unit just hasn't been able to get its legs fully under them for more than a game or two at a time. If it's not defensive coverage, then it's the goaltending, or the cup hangover, or bad officiating, or ill-timed injuries. A lot of nights, the Red Wings can win games without being the best team they can be, so when I look at their record of wins so far, I forget that I've been a little worried about one thing or another concerning their play after all but a precious handful of games this season.

Do they still have time to pull it together?

Hecks yes.

Are they going to?

I don't really know.

It could be worse. The Penguins fired their coach today. (or I guess yesterday, it being four in the morning now.) His last game was a 6-2 loss against the Toronto Maple Leafs. I watched it. Part of me sort of felt bad, but... I laughed anyway.

That's not all I watched. We rented "Newsies" this weekend.

I understand that out of the five people who read this blog, there's probably two people who have even heard of that movie, and one of them is my mother, who only has because she was watching it with us. Bear with me here.

The movie stars a young Christian Bale.

Here are some screencaps of him interspersed with pictures of Leafs rookie Luke Schenn:

Tell me I'm not imagining this.

Well that sort of sucked.

I should have written something Thursday night, because it would have been relaxed and upbeat, filled with the joy that comes from beating the Minnesota Wild. It wasn't a perfect game, but it made me forget the fact that with Lebda out, the Wings would technically be out two defensemen and two forwards for the next game, and only let me remember the happy memories - the kind of memories that get soft-lit and put up against bad music, and shown slow motion in montage form.

Alas, it was not to be.

(We'll take the blame for this one, guys. I left my lucky braclet up at school, and in a horrible accident involving a blood pressure cuff, a bag of Smarties, and a Steve Yzerman card, Lindsay messed with the delicate mojo of her lucky hat. Whoops. Our bad.)

Hopefully the more miserable moments of that game (like the Wings' "powerplay" in the third, maybe?) will be outshone in my memory by the good ones.

Like that time the Red Wings killed off a penalty without Nick Lidstrom, who got the puck as he was exiting the penalty box, took it up the ice on a breakaway, and scored like he was fricking Henrik Zetterberg or something. Tell me that wasn't awesome. You can't.

And you really can't fault the loss on Osgood, who still looks like he's well on his way back from whatever dark, dark place he went to during the last couple of weeks.

And then there was Darren Helm, whose stats don't really refelct the fact that he was everywhere last night. McCarty, who was in again on 97.1 for Ken Kal's laryngitis, said he thought Helm was the best player in the league right now with no points. I can see where he might say that, and I think the points'll come soon. I'm going to miss seeing him play live when they finally stop sending him back down to Grand Rapids. He scores goals, he makes assists, he finishes his checks - he's faster than pretty much anybody out there.

And I don't remember where I saw this, but I guess he's been winning an awful lot of face-offs for the Red Wings lately, too. Kris Draper better watch his back.

Colorado? Hopefully by tomorrow the Red Wings are back to playing like the Red Wings for a full 60 minutes.

Oh, here. I got you something.

I know it doesn't look like much, but you have to keep in mind the amount of work and sheer length of time it takes to upload images to Blogger from a dial-up internet connection. Oh yeah. I love you that much.

There can be little or no denying

how awesome that new page header is. I know you're trembling at the sheer force of the jpeg compression artifacts assaulting your retinas with amazingness.

Alright, well. It seems a little silly saying something about the last game when we're already more than halfway to the next game, but since we here at Hockeytown Static are thoroughly committed to showing up at least three days late to every party, I'm going to anyway.

Normally for games on FSN+, I opt to listen to Ken Kal because three hours hunched over my computer in front of a grainy feed doesn't do much for my back. This time, I went with the streaming video, available only in Nashville feed version. Not a great plan, to be honest.

- The announcers pronounced half the roster differently than I was used to hearing it (and apparently the Red Wings were giving ice time to Lindstrom again. About damn time, too. That man won the Norris Trophy.)

- It was sort of sad listening to them being excited about only being down by two after the first (I know. It was because the Wings had more shots that period than some (boring) games have between both teams after three.)

- During the last two minutes or so, when the Preds called a time-out, the camera zoomed in on Barry Trotz's head. Directly behind him was a man who had decided that the best thing to do was to sit back in his chair and spread his legs as wide as... I had a great simile for this last night, but now that my mother reads this blog, you'll have to use your imagination. His limberness was putting the goalies to shame. Trotz was centered. Perfectly centered. It was like he had one of those legs growing out of either ear.

NO!, I screamed at my computer, NOOOOO! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, BARRY, DON'T YOU DARE TURN AROUND!

But he did. A visual I didn't need.

- This:


I have three things to say about this:
1. Jay Leno is a creepy man who makes bad jokes on tv late at night. Ville Leino is a really good Finnish hockey player (even though his reluctance to shoot pucks hard to the net is a constant source of frustration in Grand Rapids. Hopefully with players like Franzen, Cleary, Zetterberg, etc., who can pick up those pretty passes he makes instead, this won't matter so much.)

The point is, Jay Leno makes this joke old before you tell it, and I'm already sick of hearing it. If Ville Leino needs a nickname, I'm going with what we've been calling him since he signed with the team last summer - Violin.

2. That's the best photoshop job you can do, Nashville? I'm pretty sure I could best that, and I've only got MS Paint.

3. Sometime mid-way through the game, Lindsay called me to tell me that she was 99% sure that the neck they stuck Leno's head on belongs to Kirk Maltby. And you know what? I think she might be right:


I still don't have an answer from her as to how the hell she became so intimately familiar with Kirk Maltby's neck that she recognized it on sight. And I'm not really sure I want one.

As for the Red Wings' actual play, there were a few 'what the crap was that, guys?' moments, but mostly, they actually looked like the Red Wings out there. I'll have a moment of silence now for how truly blessed I must be to be able to be blasé about my hockey team winning five straight, two of them back-to-back shutouts, and then I'll go to bed, thinking unhappy thoughts about the Minnesota Wild.

News Flash

Tyfus is in net again tonight. So I'm taking that as a yes to the question of "Is Osgood the backup again?". Mule won't play tonight; he didn't even make the trip out to Nashville. Helene St. James has the info, like always, here. The Eurotwins are still apparently on together on the top line with Cleary, which, I don't know about you, but it's a major stress reliever for me.

Sean Avery is back. Well, sort of back. He's playing for the AHL's Hartford Wolf Pack. It may just be a coincidence that he was sent to the Ranger's affiliate because Dallas's lack of an AHL team forces them to send players everywhere around the league (thanks for that, Dallas. I was starting to like Landon Wilson), but I have heard rumors that the Rangers were thinking of bringing Avery back.

Anyway...game tonight versus Nashville, so be prepared for an overload of Kenny Chesney and a possible appearance by Taylor Swift. Excited? Then you're the only one.

Well that makes me feel better about life

for the time being, anyway.

If you're reading this, I'm sure you know what happened. And you probably feel a little better about life too.

Granted, the Penguins were in a position where I'm not completely shocked they were bowled over. That doesn't matter. I still feel better about life.

12:30 is a god-awful time to start a hockey game. And on a Sunday. Do you have any idea what time I stay up on Saturday night, NBC? No, of course you don't. Because only old people watch network tv, and at 12:30 on a Sunday, old people are just getting back from church and/or Denny's and are ready to spend three sedentary hours watching a professional sport.

My bleary, sleep-deprived eyes didn't matter - the entire city of Pittsburgh told me with riotous boos when Marian Hossa got anywhere near the puck. The sound made me happy to be alive.

It's four in the morning now, and I don't have anything else intelligent to say. Here. Laugh at this picture of Sidney Crosby looking put out:

That is not a happy face. But at least it's a clean-shaven one. I was a fan of many things concerning the 2008 Stanley Cup playoffs, but Sidney Crosby's pedo-stache was not one of them. For one, to be able to grow a pedo-stache you should be reasonably old enough to warrant the 'pedo' moniker. Sidney was not. For another, I am a girl and my playoff beard was coming in less patchy than his was.

So... is Ozzie our backup goalie again? I'm cool with it; if he's going to play better with a little of the pressure taken off him, then by all means Tyfus* for starter. I would just, in a world where people make podcasts about the playoff goaltending situation in the first week of February, like it to be given to me straight. It won't shatter my world or anything. I'm one of those insufferable little fangirls who would support Chris Osgood if his GAA were higher than your school's valadictorian's GPA and he got sent down to the ECHL by the farm team, but if Conklin's our starter for now, I'm willing to pretend I've never looked at his playoff record and roll with it. I am not, however, willing to listen to five different anylists and 10 different bloggers a night try to find some sort of mystical pattern in Mike Babcock's 'wait what's going on here?' goaltending rotation. That just makes me want to hit things.

(*I realize that Typhus is a terrible, contageous disease spread by parasites, which has killed uncounted people over the centuries, but that's what Lindsay's been calling Conklin for the past six weeks or so, and I've sort of grown attatched to it. Tyfus it is.)

Dear NBC,

While I greatly appreciate the potentially seizure-inducing effects of this video, if this is your attempt at convincing people from Detroit to watch the "Game of the Week", you failed.



Unless the demographic you were aiming at was the fifteen crazy fools who think it's fun to be reminded of that horrible game back in November, and in that case, good job. I, however, already hate having to listen to Pierre McGuire and Mike Milbury argue about Detroit's "goaltender situation", and it will only be made worse hearing them yell at each other about which team gets their revenge: Detroit for losing that game at the start of the season, or Pittsburgh for losing in the Finals. I, however, will continue to hope that one day Mike gets sick of Pierre and beats him with his own shoe live on the air.

No coach makes more amusing bench faces than Gretzky

There's a game tonight. I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, after the Red Wings won the last game in a shootout over the St. Louis Blues, I skipped elatedly back to my room, wave after wave of happiness and relief washing over me. Then I stopped and thought about what kind of ass-tastical month my team must be having if I was about to break into song over a shootout win against the St. Louis Blues, and the hockey stress kind of came back stronger.

The good news is tonight I have a really good excuse not to watch the game - it's on FSN Plus, a channel that GVSU's cable service provider decided we didn't need. I'll be listening to Ken Kal via the internet, because nothing gets more French homework done than hockey over the radio. At least Zetterberg's back in the lineup.

My thoughts on what we're walking into? Well, the last time I made predictions before a Phoenix game, the worst ones came true, so I'm not even touching this one with my own opinion. Hank's horoscope has no useful insight today, unless I'm to take that his "lucky numbers" mean that the lines are going to run Helm-Samuelsson-Maltby and Zetterberg-Draper-Hudler, although if they're still playing sucky and Babcock starts pulling names from a hat again, I would not be surprised. Creeped out, maybe, now that I've written it down, but not at all surpised. Maybe somebody who's actually watching this game can fill me in if it happens; it's kind of hard to keep track of line changes when you can't actually see them.

Osgood gets the start again tonight, which I guess means that he'll also be starting in Pittsburgh on Sunday, and... ... I don't want to talk about the goalies right now, so here, have a picture of Wayne Gretzky being pissed off.


Let it give you hope for the near future.

Happy Groundhog Day

The Red Wings have lost their last 5 games (6 if you count the All Star game as a Red Wings loss, which I do, even though the standings don't). According to Bruce MacLeod, Hank's still out, Homer's still out, and now Meech is out. I think I'm having flashbacks to last February.

There are a lot of different approaches people take to hockey-related stress. Some of them turn to religion. Some of them turn to alcohol. Some of them turn to early trade rumors.

Today, I've turned to astrology.

I hold in my hands a genuine Meijer checkout line $2.49 Starscroll. Why have I purchased this? The same reason horoscopes are still printed in newspapers - sometimes you just want to see what they say. Apparently, I have no less than ten lucky love days this short month. Awesome!

How does this have anything to do with hockey? Even though he's not playing tonight, I share my sign with Henrik Zetterberg. Let's see what the fates hold in store for him today:

"What seems like a "no win" situation is apt to change quickly. Your careful handling of a $-matter or love tiff does the job. Your selflessness alters a penny-pincher's mood to create a good time this evening."

So if everything goes according to plan, the Red Wings should have a come-from-behind win against St. Louis tonight, and Hossa and/or Franzen will be inspired to take a massive pay cut to stay with the team. I hope it's right, because I can't get my money back if it isn't.

(Although, keep in mind that you're also reading Chris Pronger's horoscope. I don't know if I'd have pegged him as a Libra.)