- What a start. What a first period.
- (I waited until the first period had ended to type that because I was sure if I put the words on the screen before time was up the Bruins would score a garbage goal with like 20 seconds to go.)
- (Maybe I should have waited until the end of the game.)
- Rask had an amazing first period and a decent rest of game against the Habs. Seriously, what’s wrong with him 🙁
- The Habs played one of their best periods of the season during the first. They dominated on every fancy stat, from Corsi to Fenwick to Team That Does Not Have Brad Marchand On It.
- Brad Marchand is the hockey equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
- And at the beginning of the second, the old Habs came back, and started the period off by seemingly trying to get out of the Bruins’ zone … and that set the tone for the rest of the game.
- The sequence that led to the Bruins’ first goal was tragicomical. How do you hockey?
- Their second goal was just purdy. I love Patrice Bergeron and I don’t care what anyone thinks.
- Okay, so Milan Lucic scoring was basically insult to injury and then CharChand scoring was adding insult to puking.
- Let’s focus on the first period for a second. Dear Michel Therrien: if you have the puck all the time, you do not need to dump, chase, or grind. You can dominate. Accept it.
- Silver lining: here is Marc Bergevin, doing all the things he thinks Michel Therrien needs (trading Diaz, adding “toughness” or “grit” or whatever,getting a scoring winger) … and they are not working. At some point things have to start clicking in his brain.
- Right?
- Another silver lining: this was the national game in the US, so Jack Edwards did not experience the joy of calling this.
- I don’t want Therrien fired. I want him banned from coaching at any level so he cannot inflict this cruelty on any fan base ever again, NOT EVEN THE CANUCKS FAN BASE.
- So … Peter Budaj has not played very well during our Priceless stretch. But how many of those goals do you look at and go “yikes … that D-coverage.” Makes you appreciate Carey Price’s abilities even more, now, doesn’t it?
- I almost don’t want him to come back TOO soon because I want it to be clear beyond any reasonable doubt to Bergevin.
- Jordan Caron is a bag of … male appendages.
- The misuse of Lars Eller brings me to tears sometimes. I hope he ends up in a good home.
- Also every time I see or hear or use the word ‘appendages’ I think about the time I was driving home from my old job (during the SCF in 2010, I think), listening to Mitch Melnick on the radio, and he had Pierre McGuire on, and McGuire kept going on and on and on about how Chris Pronger was a big man with small appendages and sometimes I wonder if he hears himself speak and whether he knows how creepy he sounds?
- Chris Pronger does have freakishly small feet for a hockey player his size, though.
- I was thinking about the mediocre East and the struggling teams in the west (mainly Edmonton) and it seems to me that it doesn’t matter how much firepower there is up front (Edmonton, Philadelphia, Montreal, and if we’re going to count Pittsburgh as a currently struggling team) and it doesn’t matter if a team has a stud top defenseman (Ottawa, for example). If you have really bad players in your bottom six or your second and lower defense pairings, no good, bad, or average coach is going to be able to do much. And in our case, the coach is firmly in the “bad” column. There is such a thing as a good third liner or fourth liner (hello, Chicago, and Detroit before the last two years) and unfortunately there aren’t enough of them to go around, or management seems to see all replacement players as equal.
- Anyway … I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately and I don’t know if I made sense there but basically we’re screwed.
- Your three stars: L’ANTICHAMBRE QUESTIONED FRANCIS BOULLION’S ICE TIME. I REPEAT, L’ANTICHAMBRE QUESTIONED FRANCIS BOULLION’S ICE TIME. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
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