Category: Hockey

Thank You, Bruins

If the price of the Red Sox winning the World Series is that the Bruins have to suck for a while, then I’ll pay that price. Now that the parade is over though, it’s time for the sucking to end.

While I still have not recovered from the Stanley Cup Finals game six choke, I am ready to start loving hockey again. I’ve been there since the puck dropped in the opening game, but the Sox did distract me.

The Bruins have been crap-tastic for a couple of weeks now. This is the team that went to the Finals last year, and they are sucking up the joint against the Islanders and the Stars? No, enough. That needs to end.

Fortunately, last night was a step in the right direction. I was following the game, but I only managed to listen to the first period. It was scoreless after one, so I was afraid it might end up as more of the same. They were playing Florida whose suck level is so high it is incalculable. Turns out the B’s were just teasing me. They took the lead in the second period and then went for the Panthers’ throat in the third and put it all away.

Thank you, Boston Bruins. Thank you for playing like you meant it last night. Now keep up the good work!

Go Bruins!

Win Win Win

The Red Sox took a 2-0 lead in their ALDS series against Tampa Bay with a 7-4 win tonight. David Ortiz hit two home runs. The second has yet to land.

The Bruins beat the Red Wings 4-1. They are 2-0 on the young season.

Some fat boy got new glasses.

20131005-213829.jpg

Win, win, win.

Better… Sort of… Almost

I almost feel a little better today. Sort of. I’m still really congested but it’s not as bad as it was. I can almost (not quite) breath through my nose today. The coughing and sneezing are not entirely gone, but they have been reduced. I have a little more energy today, although not much. I’m still feeling run down. So I’m almost feeling a little better. Kind of.

Want to hear a little crazy talk? It’s been 10 days since I’ve had a sip of coca~cola. Coca~cola is my nemesis. I love it so. Oh, how I love that caramel colored, carbonated, caffeinated goodness. Sweet nectar of life, I love it so. But it is probably the #1 cause of my skyrocketing out of control weight. Every once in a while I try to cut it out of my diet. 10 days is a good start. I have also managed to completely avoid caffeine during that time too. I have not eliminated soda. I’ve been getting a Canada Dry Ginger Ale at lunch on the days I am in the office. There’s one sitting next to me right now. Other than that it has been water, water with flavoring, gatorade, or other fruit type juices. I did not weigh myself before jumping on the wagon, so I don’t know if I’ve lost any weight. I do know that I’ve managed to sleep better in the last couple of nights. I’ll take that as a plus. I have also been trying to avoid the cafeteria at lunch time. I’ve brown bagged it each day that I’ve been in the office, and avoided going out of pigging out like a madman when working at home. The gym has been tougher. I’ve only gone twice in the 10 days. Being sick got in the way a couple of times, but it’s still not a regular thing yet. I might try again tomorrow.

On a totally unrelated note, Flickr is shutting down for maintenance tonight from 4:00-10:00pm Pacific time. That means no uploading anything tonight. Not that I have anything to upload. I will now post one picture as an experiment to see if the site going down includes losing access to everything. You’re fascinated, I can tell.

How about a picture of a Union Jack, taken at Colonial Williamsburg? You know, in honor of the royal baby and all. Yeah, that.
Untitled

What else is there. Oh, hockey. The NHL finally announced next season’s schedule. No word yet on how they plan to force the cancellation of half of it, the way they did last year. The league has been realigned. The Bruins are now in the Atlantic Division. No teams from the old Atlantic are in the new Atlantic. Most of those teams are in the… wait for it… Metropolitan Division.

Oh please, that’s the best you could do? Why not the Teams Sort of Closest to New York Division? Why not the Middle East Division. Cause… these are teams that are in the East, but south of New England and North of Florida, so they are kind of in the Middle of the East, therefore Middle East. Get it? Even that is better than Metropolitan Division.

Well, lunch break is ending. Time to pop some DayQuil and try and figure out some bugs. Happy Wednesday.

Friday

There is no hockey game tonight. That blows. I hate this two days between games crap. It’s torture, especially when your team lost the last game. We need a game tonight, damn it!

Hey, guess what. Today is the first day of summer. Yesterday was a beautiful day to send off Spring and now we have Summer. Today is the longest day of the year (sunlight wise), which to an eternal pessimist means: It’s all down hill from here. Or as folks in Game of Thrones would say, Winter is coming.

So I’ve watched every episode of Game of Thrones. When does it get good? No, really. It’s not bad. I wasn’t forced to watch three seasons (10 episodes per season… screw you and your crap HBO. How about 26 episodes per season the way the real networks do it. Jerks). It wasn’t bad. It’s just that so many people told me it was the greatest thing ever. I guess it just didn’t come close to living up to the hype. There are some characters that I really like (forgive me for not trying to spell first names) the dwarf Lannister (sp?) brother is the best part of the whole show. He’s smart, manipulative, and damn funny. I thought they under used him in season three. Hopefully that changes. Same thing with the younger of the Stark daughters. I expect her to be running things when the story ends, but she was sort of boring in season three. She did end with a bang though.

All in all, the show is okay. I’m not in a hurry for the next season to start, as I am with The Walking Dead, but it’s just sort of… okay. Why then did I start listening to the book on tape of the first book? Why? I know it’s just okay. Why? Urgh.

Happy Summer.
Go Bruins.

Jarome Iginla

The NHL trade deadline is coming.  It’s time for the annual, “Wouldn’t Jarome Iginla look good in a Bruins uniform?” discussions.  Whenever Calgary starts slipping the conversation inevitably begins.  He should ask for a trade for the good of the team.  The team needs to trade their best player ever for the good of the franchise.  Yadda, yadda, yadda.  Eventually the topic always turns to how Boston should go out and get him.

A few years ago I was fully in the do-whatever-it-takes-to-get-this-guy camp.  Now… he’s getting old.  He’s 35, which is very old for most hockey players.  He’s not going to come into Boston and light the lamp 50 times in the final month of the season.  He’s not going to show up and solve all of our offensive problems.  He’s probably not even going to be one of our top scorers.  Should we still pay the unquestionably high price to get him?

HELL YES!

When the Bruins traded for Marc Recchi a few years ago, I was insulted.  Recchi was ancient by hockey standards, and his best years were so far behind him it was sick.  Then he got here and became “The Veteran”.  He set himself up as the elder statesman.  All of the young players looked up to him.  All of them saw him as a role model.  All of them saw his Stanley Cup rings and bought in.  What happened?  Well, just a Stanley Cup a couple of years later.  That’s all.

Iginla is better now than Recchi was then.  He’s never won a championship, but most of the current roster has, so we don’t need that sort of leadership like we did when Recchi got here.  What we do have is a bunch of forwards who go through streaks where they struggle to score goals.  Iginla can assume the role of “The Veteran” and smoothe out all of those scary times when Lucic and Horton and Marchant and Seguin all suddenly forget how to score.  Look at me, he can say, I’m Jarome Iginla and I have twice hit the 50 goals in a season mark.  Learn from me as I demonstrate the wonders of hard work and consistency.

On top of that, throughout his career Iginla has been an A list power forward.  He is what Milan Lucic needs to be.  Wants to be.  Must be.  Trading for Iginla would be worth it just so he could teach Looch what he needs to learn.

People are already complaining about the possibility of the Bruins giving up Malcolm Subban.  Subban is 19, playing in juniors, and a very late first round pick.  In other words, he hasn’t done anything real yet (no offense) and he won’t be ready to contribute at the NHL level for a while.  I hear people saying three years but that seems super optimistic to me.  I say deal him to Calgary and then work your black and gold asses off to sign Iginla for a few more years.

I ask you, wouldn’t Jarome Iginla look good in a Boston Bruins uniform?

I answer you.  Yes, yes he would.

Go get him!

Goal!

Martin Brodeur is the greatest goalie in the history of professional hockey.  Last night, he was also a goal scoring machine.

It wasn’t a case of “he shoots he scores”, it was more like “he makes a save during a delayed penalty and some Whaler makes a crappy pass that banks off the boards in the New Jersey end and deflects all the way down to the Whaler’s end and goes right smack into the middle of the net”.

It was the third goal of his career.  100 years from now, some kid walking through the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto is going to see the Martin Brodeur display and it is going to list his career stats:
9 billion wins.
2 billion shutouts.
3 goals.

Note, I have watched this video but I have not listened to it.  I do not know if any hockey announcers say anything stupid or not.  You’ve been warned.

Staying with the hockey theme, as I posted yesterday, I got home from picking up the kids and put the game on the radio.  By radio, I mean the CBS radio iPhone app that streams 98.5 WBZ FM.  As soon as the stream reached my ear pods Ottawa scored.  I listened for a while feeling completely underwhelmed by the Bruins performance.  Before the second period ended I put the game on the TV.  With less than two minutes left in the second the Bruins tied the game.  Intermission started, I went to say good night to the first step child.  I then watched some of the third period and the Bruins were not the snooze inducing hockey boredom machines they had been in the second.  They had a little more life.  I had to go downstairs and do some laundry business, then say good night to the second step child, then turn out all the lights and lock the doors, then get into bed.  I had planned to listen to the end of the game while reading a little, but I was a little late.  I checked the score.  Bruins win 2-1.

This season’s shortened schedule really is an insult to hockey lovers everywhere.  The Bruins have played 29 games and we’re already nearly 75% of the way through the season.  That’s garbage.  The reason you play a long season is so that everyone can get the crap kicked out of them by life itself, and the really good teams separate themselves from the not so good teams.  That’s not going to happen this year.  I mean, the Leafs are in sixth in the East.  That’s all the proof you need!

Having said that, I don’t really see the Bruins contending for the Cup the way many in the press seem to.  They just don’t have the fire yet.  They don’t have the killer instinct.  They have lost four games in which they had the lead in the third period.  When they are good they are outstanding.  When they aren’t good they are maddeningly boring and mediocre.

The third period last night was a nice change from the recent snooze.  Let’s hope the momentum continues Saturday night in Toronto.

Go Bruins.

Stompin Tom Connors

This has turned out to be a bad night for music that you probably haven’t heard, maybe.

Stompin Tom Connors has passed away.

I don’t know if we can call him a Canadian Icon or not.  Not being from Canada it would be presumptuous of me to call him a Canadian Icon.  I do know that he won a bunch of Juno awards (the Canadian version of the Grammies) and gave them back to protest the fact that many of the winners were Canadians living in the United States.  I guess that’s not Canadian enough for Canada’s Grammies.

He also wrote the one song that MUST be played during every hockey game.  Be it in an intermission, or during a stoppage in play, it doesn’t matter.  Stompin Tom’s Hockey Song NEEDS to be played at all hockey games.

Bruins 2 – Senators 1

The Bruins beat the Senators tonight 2-1 in overtime. The first Bruins goal was the cheapest goal I’d seen in ages. The Ottawa goal was even cheaper. Then in OT, Bergeron trickled the puck onto, but not over, the goal line. Ottawa’s goalie took off his blocker, reached for the puck with his bare hand, and instead of grabbing it, he knocked it an inch or two over the line before scooping it up. Bruins win.

Three goals.
Three impossibly cheap goals.
You’d think it was a full moon or something. Is it a full moon? No, it’s not a full moon. The game just made tonight feel like one.

Go Bruins!