Having spent as much of my vacation on hockey as humanly possible, I will say this. There's a reason the Portland Winterhawks are the bottom of the barrel in the WHL. Boy howdy, and I thought I had gotten used to an AHL level of play.
Every time I watch an NHL game, I'm stupidly excited by how many passes actually connect solidly, as in the AHL the tendency is to get it almost there and have it take a wierd bounce or be completely missed right at the last second. In the WHL, really, I was getting excited when a pass got within five feet of someone in the same uniform, which is kind of a sad commentary on the state of my home team.
Of course, you can't really take it out too hard on the guys. The Winterhawks are a major junior team, after all. These are still high school-age dudes, and they are still technically in a training league. The only one I found myself consistently abusing during the course of the game was the goalie, who neglected to finish his butterfly slide across the net and let Seattle dingle one in off his toe. And don't get me started on him being on approach vector for the blueline a couple of times. I don't care what the hell his name really is is (Mucha,) he's always going to be "GoddammitBabyConks!" to me after that game.
Not that the Hawks always sucked, either. Back in the day when they had Hershey defector Jakub Klepis and Reading Royal goalie Curtis Darling, they were the Western playoff champions, and five years prior to that they swept the Memorial Cup awards entirely. It's just lately they've become an axis of suck, from what I can tell. Which is sad, as Oregon needs all the hockey it can get and they're not helping prove my claim that we could support and love an NHL team if we got one. Even if they do call us Hawkeytown
And just to drive home that Oregon as Non-Hockey-State bit? Two bookstores down (one being a chain, the other being the big indie bookstore here) I can't find a copy of any of The Hockey News's big issues on a newsstand. The horror! How will I live without Sid's pillowesque lips for the entire plane ride home?
Ah... erm... anyway.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
WHL, NHL, AHL, QHL, XHL, WTF-HL...
Monday, December 24, 2007
All I Want for Christmas...
Some Senators tell you what their best Christmas gifts were. Santa came early for Mike Fisher and gave him his front teeth back after they were knocked out when he was Zidaned by Scott Walker
Because I'm picky like that, there's a continuity alert as you'll see from this video from the Senators website that Jason Spezza's best Christmas gift was actually when his parents gave him a year's supply of bubblegum.
As your supreme HLOG overlord has previously mentioned, hope everybody has an extremely wonderful and SENSational (see what I did there?) holiday season. Read More......
Merry Christmas and to all a good night!
I'm a good 2 hours early (well in Australialand) and the HLOG office has been a little half empty. We're all hitting the problem of trying to balance our hard partying lifestyles with the duty of being a faithful HLOG typer. I'll be honest that my only need for the Habs to satisfy me is for them to just win (which they won't because let's face it - they're slimy little fucks).
So for this Christmas in the HLOG headquarters of Jordi's house, she'll be kicking back with some non-hockey socialising and embarrassing myself on a friend's Wii (named PNES because he is a geek and he found it hilarious).
However as a big thankyou to everyone else, to all you gals who might have been around since the last months or even our first christmas last year - it's a big Merry Christmas from Jordi.
And as the head bitch, I'll be giving any of our readers a big
BIG MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM HLOG.
(oh and may the Habs feast on the blood of your newborn rookies and slightly ragged veterans with gimpy legs)
