The Habs lose Cammallleri, and the game, but managed to squeeze out a point thanks to Halak (again!). Final score: 3-2.
The Leafs get given a 3-goal lead thanks to abysmal goaltending by Roberto Luongo, and still manage to lose 5-3 to Vancouver. A bazillion points for the Sedin-Sedin-Burrows line. Toronto wishes they had kept Andrew Raycroft, who shut them out for two periods!
Up next: The Battle of Alberta, or…The Battle of the Losing Streaks! Flames have lost 9 in a row, Oilers have lost 12 in a row. Who gets to continue to suck more?
The first period against the Blackhawks showcased why the Sharks have lost in the playoffs the past few seasons. The Sharks players are used to having a certain amount of time and space, you can think of it like a bubble or ring surrounding a given player. In the playoffs, teams play like there’s no tomorrow, and so hustle harder and skate faster. These two things vastly shrink that time/space bubble the Sharks are used to operating with. Speed also shrinks it, which is what happened against Chicago. (Chicago has an impressive amount of hustle, too.)
The simple way of combating the loss of space is simply to assume that your opponent is, or very soon will be, right on your ass. If the puck is at all loose, it’s up for grabs, so act like there’s always a guy trying to steal the puck. If you play like that, all the time, you will be ready for the playoffs when the assumption becomes reality. It might
The Sharks did well to shut down Chicago and come back from a 0-3 deficit, but they should never had been in that situation.
The only good thing is that by the time these two teams meet in the playoffs, it’ll probably be the conference finals, with two series worth of pounding on both teams, reducing speed as a factor.
Hopefully they can make me feel better by crushing a Minnesota team 20+ points behind them tonight.
I love that Marc-André Bergeron broke a guy’s leg with his slapshot. It sucks for the Sens and Foligno, but damn that’s one fuck of a slapshot! It was a terrible game, injury wise, though, for both teams. Unless Gainey is a total idiot, I expect a trade/acquisition of some sort soon, because the Habs are kind of screwed without Cammy.
Question: If a player is injured long-term, are they paid the same/does that free up cap space in any way, to let a team fill that hole? It seems with enough major injuries, that a club wouldn’t be able to field a full team if they were completely restricted by the cap.
It looks like the Oilers suck the most (did anyone doubt it?). Flames up 5-1 in the second.
We didn’t make it out. Didn’t wanna chance the ride home with the temps so low that the brine freezes. Glad you made it home safe.
What a freaking game! We looked at each other after it was over and said “If I’d known it was gonna be that good, I would have insisted we go!” I seriously expected the Hawks to roll, but the Canes are riding the high.
Really wish this team had shown up in October.
(Have you noticed that every bobblehead this season has had a serious injury?Cole, LaRose, Ruutu, and Staal)
The Canucks/Leafs game had me literally screaming at the TV. Vancouver is a team that is going to be asking an awful lot of its starting goalie in the next month and a half. I did not even momentarily agree with him being in net against Toronto. I did, however, enjoy Raycroft shutting out the team that bought out his contract and then taking a victory lap to wave at the Canucks jerseys in attendance.
Whoa. Dion Phaneuf has been traded to the Maple Leafs. Details of the trade are still pending, but this is going to be a massive trade. What on earth could Toronto have to offer in return?
This trade may set up Calgary with enough cap space to make a run at Kovulchuk.
There’s also a rumour out there that Toronto has acquired Giguerre and a pick for Toskala. If that’s true, it’s a salary dump for the Ducks.
I would say that this will be nice in that we won’t have to listen to Calgary media trying to pump up Phaneuf as the second coming of Scott Stevens, except that he’s gone to the hockey media capital of the world.
That was my immediate gut reaction as well, but looking at the numbers it might not be too bad of a deal for Calgary. The fact is, Phaneuf hasn’t been living up to the hype the past couple years - a force to be reckoned with when he is on, but disoriented and ineffectual far too often for someone getting $6.5 million/year. Ian White, who we are getting in return, actually has put up more points than Phaneuf this year - while we’ll miss Dion’s big hit, I think our blueline is still in good shape with Bouwmeester, Regehr, Giordano and now White. Hagman fills in the weakness we have in LW (though I hear he is a streaky scorer, when what we really need is consistency), and while Stajan looks like he has put up some respectable numbers he is yet another 2nd line center when we are aching for a top 1st line center (as Jokinen has turned out to be severe disappointment).
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Phaneuf back on the top of his game a couple years down the road though, I seem to remember this happening plenty often with former-Flames (Marc Savard, Martin St. Louis, Cory Stillman).
I’ll admit that I’ve seen very little of White and the Maple Leafs this season, but in previous years he’s been a fringe sixth or seventh defenceman. Maybe he’s magically been able to make himself into a top-four defender, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
This is a positively ludicrous trade. Phaneuf is a tremendous player - he’s having a poor year by his standards and he’s still better than any defenceman Toronto has, and he should have been on the Olympic team. In return Calgary’s getting a some players who are good (White, Hagman and Stajan) and Meyers, who I wouldn’t even have bothered asking for.
The general feeling in the media is that the Flames have panicked over their slump and are trying to plug several holes at once. It’s a horrible trade for them, unelss something was going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about. Phaneuf will be more valuable over the rest of his career than all four players he was traded for will be combined, unless White or Stajan are amazing late bloomers or something.
This combined with Toronto’s deal of Blake and Toskala to Anaheim for Giguere are, frankly, what the Leafs SHOULD have done before the season started, rather than pretending they had a good team. If they’re positioning themselves to build for the future these are excellent moves.
I don’t understand it from Calgary’s perspective at all, except as a move made from sheer “Look, we’re doing something!” fear. The spin is that Hagman and Stajan add scoring punch, which is true, but it’s not like they got Phil Esposito here. There is never a worse time for a team to make a big deal than in response to the worst slump of the year, and this is why; you make the wrong move.
There have been rumblings in Calgary all year of moving Phaneuf, though I hadn’t really taken any of them seriously. Admittedly, getting rid of Phaneuf does add some flexibility come year-end - Stajan and Mayers are UFAs at the end of the season and White a RFA, and combined with people like Olli Jokinen and Rene Bourque also becoming UFAs Sutter will have the ability to pick and choose who he wants to keep and ditch the rest, potentially freeing up room to pick up a $7 million forward on the free agency market (eg. Marleau, or possibly Kovalchuk). Whether it was better to ditch Dion now or later is up for question.
It has been kind of disappointing that Sutter has done little to improve the long-term prospects for the team though - he seems to bring in a lot of players near the end of their contract just to see them go the following year. This move is yet another step down that path.
Sutter clearly has some sort of plan, although I don’t know what it is. According to TSN,
I’m not sure what this accomplishes. Jokinen and Higgins are all free agents at the end of the year but Calgary is stuck with Kotalik for two more seasons at 3 million per seasons. It’s not like he’s young, he’s 31 so we can’t expect any major improvements over the next few years.
It’s been a baffling and frustrating day to be a Flames fan.