More Hockey Than You Can Shake A Stick At

Wild 3, Avalanche 2

Olympic Diving Back In The NHL
Yep, he's back: Peter Floppa Forsberg.  The Avalanche signed Floppa to a pro-rated contract for the remainder of the 2010-2011 season.  When he will actually play is still unclear as there appear to be some immigration issues that need to be resolved first.  For those of you unfamiliar with Peter's greatest ability and contribution to the NHL - he's the reason why the act of diving (embellishing) carries a misconduct penalty.   
 

Best tweet of the day, perhaps of all time, from Puck Daddy (Greg Wyshinski):  It's not so much that I get hate mail.  It's that I get hate mail from people who think there's a hyphen in "fuck you." 

Goalies Gone Wild
WTF is going on with NHL goalies this last week?  Are they amped up on Red Bull or 5 Hour Energy drinks?  Should we be testing for steroids? - cuz there's some serious anger issues in net these days. 

Rick DiPietro starts things out by getting in a goalie fight with Pittsburgh's Brent Johnson last week.  Brent cold-cocked Rick with one punch and now Rick is out for 4-6 weeks with facial fractures and knee swelling.  The knee swelling is a recurring thing for DiPietro - his porcelain knees and overinflated contract make Gaborik look healthy and underpaid by comparison *insert rim shot here*.   

Carey Price and Tim Thomas squared off in tonight's Bruins vs Habs game - actually this was one of those classic "I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out" scenes.  Reminds me of the hockey of my youth.  *sigh*  Check out the boxscore of that game - it's 2 pages long!  The video link is courtesy of www.hockeyfights.com.  Great tweet about this game: @dangeroushockey rocco @wyshynski "I'm really enjoying VS new format for the NHL games. Goal, fight, goal, fight, goal, 2 fights, goal, 3 fights...interesting."There was one point in the 3rd period of the Wild game tonight where it looked like Matt Cullen was going to go toe-to-toe with Avs goalie Budaj.  Just about everyone on the ice, including Budaj was throwing punches and I thought for sure I was going to see my first goalie fight.  But the cooler head of Nik Backstrom prevailed and he just hung out at his net on the other end of the ice.  And I still don't get why we ended up with the extra penalty out of that kerfuffle - Coach, got anything for me on that?  



Oh, there was a Wild game tonight.  It was a good game, for the most part.  Our first period was fast and furious: Wild scored on the power play at 15:00, woo-hoo!  "Scoring for Minnesota - On The Power Play"...never freakin' mind, the Avs scored - 11 seconds later.  I hate it when our P.A. guy can't even get the Wild scoring information out before the opponent shuts us up by putting the puck past our goalie.  I hate that as much as I hate Wild players making cross crease passes in our own zone.  But wait, 40 seconds later we scored again and this time it sticks with a 2-1 lead going into the second period.  Just so that Bobbi doesn't think I'm only ragging on one particular player: Miettinen's power play goal is his first home ice goal since Nov. 17th.    

Vicki said it best during the second period when the Wild were sliding and struggling: "the other team has us running and that's when the Wild get into trouble."  She was right.  During the early part of the second period it looked like there were 3 Avs players to every 1 of our Wild guys on the ice.  But at the midway point Jared Spurgeon started the drive to the net and fed a pass to Cullen who set up John Madden for only his 8th goal of the year.  For Bobbi - Russo Tweet: "To those who asked me who Madden was yelling at after his goal, "Myself." trying to pump himself up, not happy w lack of goals lately."  Madden is also quoted in Russo's post game blog as not being happy with his goal production.  The best thing about Madden's goal was that he effectively chased Anderson from the Avs goal.  In an attempt to spark the team, the Avs brought in Budaj to see if his team mates would kick it into high gear.  The Wild took the 3-1 lead into the second intermission.  

Third period was interesting - from the standpoint of watching the Avs crosscheck, hook and trip the Wild relentlessly with no calls from the refs - who were watching from just inches away.  Then the bru-haha broke out and after everything was sorted the Wild ended up killing a 2 minute penalty - successfully, so there you stupid refs.  The Avs got their second goal of the game right off the bat in the third period.  David Jones scored both goals for Colorado, or as Bobbi said "Davey Jone's Locker - Curses"  That's what I love the most about Bobbi, her quick wit.  Anyway...the Wild hung on and in those last five minutes of the third Vicki and I were reaching for the Tumms and holding our breath and cursing under our breath and exhaling slowly until the puck was finally cleared out of our zone.  The buzzer sounded and we came away with a solid 3-2 win. 

Nik was spectacular tonight - that skate save move he's got going on...very dazzling piece of work.  Our defense as a whole, including Barker (tastes nasty in my mouth to say that), was SOLID. 

The tribute to Bruno before the game was top notch, first class:
  


Extra bonus points for those of you who can name five of the players on the bench during the video's first 15 seconds.  

Here's Simon, Bruno's dog, doing Let's Play Hockey with Andrew's younger brother.