WOOOO DREW MILLER!!

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.

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.