Ahhh The Hawks raise the banner tonight. Going to be pretty surreal. If the tickets didn't sell out so fast, I'd probably be there. Rings Spoiler It's great to have hockey back though. It's going to be a crazy season once again.
Had my fantasy hockey draft last night. Wrong forum and all that, but here's my team: Fowards/Defensemen E. Staal H. Sedin M. Boedker B. Bennett J. Franzen A. Galchenyuk D. Byfuglien D. Stepan C. Kunitz J. Ericsson J. Muzzin L. Visnovsky D. Boyle N. Kronwall R. Suter G. Nyquist (pending waiver transaction to drop him and add Abdelkader from DET) J. Staal C. Wilson D. Roy Goalies: C. Price J. Howard B. Elliott
I've said it in the past, but this season I mean it. I'm going to get into hockey. I think it will be a lot easier now that I live in St. Louis and will actually have a local NHL team to follow game by game. One of the guys that I work with has season tickets to the Blues and said that any time the guy he has tickets with isn't going that he would let me know so I could go. All of the other games will also be on FS Midwest here. The negative is that I have Directv and they only offer NHL Network and NBCSN (the two channels that consistently show hockey) on one of their higher tiers of channels and I don't have that tier. Looking forward to the season and let's go Blues!
that habs/leafs game was fun to watch. 100 penalty mintues... wow. Really felt bad for Parros though, that was a bad break for him.
Nice to know that literally nothing has changed about Roy's demeanor. There was a great season preview piece on Grantland by Sean McIndoe. In it, he talked about the Avs hire of Roy and he linked to a bunch of great videos from his playing days. There was even one video where, late in a blowout game, he saved a shot and then handled the puck all the way past the center line. Then he looked shocked that he wasn't allowed to do that.
Kind of a strange game between the Blues and Predators tonight. The Blues came out and scored three goals in the first ten minutes, which forced the Predators to pull Pekka Rinne. The Predators outscored the Blues 2-1 the rest of the way in large part thanks to the play of backup goalie Carter Hutton, who had only played in one other NHL game coming into tonight. But of course it was too late at that point.
Roy's awesome. Love his passion and intensity. Its something the Avs have been missing. There were a lot of things that lead up to that moment. Perry started the war of words with Roy and even squirted water at the Avs bench. But what really had Roy upset was the cheap shots the Ducks tried to take on Mackinnon in the 3rd period. Lovejoy stuck out his knee trying to make contact with Mac and that's unacceptable.
Loving the 3-0 start to the Avs season. This is the 1st time in Av history the team has started 3-0 and that includes the contending teams they had in the teams first 8 years or so. Moving O'Reilly to the wing and drafting MacKinnon along with a healthy Downie and Landeskog, a rejuvenated McGinn and adding Tanguay to the mix the Avs have 3 legit scoring lines. The defense is still suspect, but with Roy on board and bringing in his goalie coach from his Montreal days they have done wonders with Varlamov and he has been a beast in the 3 wins only allowing 1 goal in each of the 3 wins. The talent was always their with Varly, they put the work in the offseason on putting him in better positions as they felt that was his biggest issue. The new group the Avs are in has the Hawks and Blues as the front runners, but after those two teams the group is wide open with Dallas, Nashville, Minnesota and Winnipeg. A third place finish in any group guarantees a playoff spot.
Another lead evaporated in the 3rd. The season's still young, but let's just hope this doesn't turn into a running theme.
