Sunday is going to be an exciting day for hockey fans.The Red Wings and Capitals are up @ bat and their fans will be watching to see how they deliver.
The Wings are up first against the San Jose Sharks.The Sharks are young and aggressive and they will be a handful for Detroit.Hockey Town USA is a tough place to be on the losing end of a series so the 2011 Red Wings are going to have to pick up their game. San Jose is not Phoenix.If Detroit goes down 2-0 today, they will have the almost impossible task of battling back. If Jimmy Howard cracks under pressure, the Sharks will pounce and put this one away.
Washington plays later today against the Bolts.Tampa smacked the Caps around in their first match up and you can be sure that Bruce Boudreau's men will want some payback.Ovechkin has to come to the rink today for Washington.If Washington can get everyone ticking along, they should dispose of Tampa easily. Without Ovechkin, Washington will fold like a deck of cards and Stamkos and the boys will take them out to the woodshed. It could get ugly.
There is nothing like the "good old hockey game" !!!Turn this tune up , grab some beers and warm up the couch !!!!
MAKE THE DAY EVEN BETTER - PLAY FANTASY HOCKEY AND WIN CASH TODAY !!!
Watching the Stanley Cup playoffs is like the holy grail for hockey nuts everywhere.Get Real Hockey wants you to have fun watching the showdowns and maybe make some money at the same time. Join the Get Real Hockey family on FanDual.com @
Is it fair to call Thursday night's five-point performance by the Tampa Bay Lightning's Steven Stamkos (who got a hat trick, among the five) an explosion, when it seems like his entire start to the season has been an explosion out of the gate? Forget the fact that he now has 19 goals in 19 games this season. Hell, forget the fact that, dating back to late in his rookie season, he has scored 79 goals in 114 games, a 0.69 goal-per-game pace that would give him 57 in an 82-game season... which, coincidentally, is the same pace he set late in that rookie season, when, from March 17, 2009 onward, he netted nine in that year's final 13 games.
"Why would I know anything about hockey? I don't even know anything about hair."
Maybe it's just me, but I'm prepared to go out on a very long limb and say former Lightning head coach Barry Melrose, who limited Stamkos's minutes that year and said after getting fired in November after compiling a 5-7-4 record: "Right now he's just not strong enough physically to play against defensemen who are 6'3" or 6'4" that can skate as good as him" didn't know what he was talking about. Of course, an 82-103-21 coaching record before he took over the reins behind the Lightning bench to start the year might have also served as a good indication of that fact, but what are you going to do, Oren Koules and Len Barrie? Look back to see how successful the candidates to fill your team's head-coaching vacancy have been in the past?
For the record, Stamkos only had four points in those 16 games under Melrose and then went on to score 42 points in 63 games the rest of the way. And, now? Well, 35 points in 19 games. Need I say more? Probably not, but what the hell? Stamkos has arrived, is here to stay, and Melrose, may he never come back.
So, Tampa Bay Lightning captain Vincent Lecavalier is now out, which would kind of matter if the book on him hasn’t been for the past two years.
I believe it’s entitled Great Unfulfilled Expectations, an unheralded instant classic that chronicles the main character’s constant run-ins with two primary antagonists: the villainous injury bug, which time and again has slowed and killed any forward momentum mustered in his career, as well as his own past success, which continues to haunt him just as his overbearing 11-year, $85-million contract does management and the team’s fan base.
Brilliant stuff, really, subject to rave reviews. Granted those rave reviews have been written by division rivals and lower-tier players grateful for the inflationary side-effects his nonsense deal has had on their salaries, but any feedback must be good feedback when you’re talking about a player becoming increasingly irrelevant in the landscape of the game today, who’s now been reduced to playing second fiddle to fellow-center and fellow-former-number-one-draft-pick Steven Stamkos, who at the tender age of 19 was able to do what it took Lecavalier eight seasons to accomplish, and that is to score 50 goals in one season.
Admittedly, not too many players get the chance to count themselves among the true elite of the sport who have reached that milestone, and Lecavalier does deserve props for that one season back in 2006-2007, but his point and goal totals have dropped significantly since then, from 108 (52), to 92 (40), to 67 (29), followed by a slight uptick to 70 (24) last season.
I get that Lecavalier is currently the team’s captain and he brings certain “intangibles” to the table, but more and more those intangibles look like him handicapping his team financially for the next decade, thereby preventing them from ever repeating as Stanley Cup champions, which, by the way, they won without him as captain. He had been stripped of it for being too immature.
Of course, it’s hard to make the argument that the Lightning would be more competitive without Lecavalier on the roster, because they still have over $11 million in cap space with him, but as a small-market team the Lightning can ill-afford to throw money away to the first person that comes along, especially with the next person, Stamkos, due for a big raise when he becomes a restricted free agent this summer.
"I think I just tweaked something stretching... damn. Coach said NOT to over-exert myself."
So, with Lecavalier now out of the line-up after breaking his hand on the most innocuous of plays against the Washington Capitals, it now perhaps opens the door for more ice time to be given to some of the more deserving players on the Lightning’s roster, at least for the next three-to-four weeks, at which point he is set to return and brainwash the coaching staff into thinking he is actually more valuable than say Dominic Moore, another centre on the team that represents one-seventh of Lecavalier’s salary-cap hit.
Moore, who has played four less games due to a groin injury, has just two fewer points. Not only that, but he gets less ice time than Lecavalier. So much so that, when adding up his ice time into 60-minute shifts, he averages 3.60 points per full game. Lecavalier averages 2.07. Even one of the team’s reserve centres in Blair Jones, with just two points, averages 3.56 points per full game, having played just 33:42 this year.
Obviously, putting Jones ahead of Lecavalier on the team’s depth chart is ludicrious, but it is food for thought along with the fact that the league’s leading scorer in Stamkos averages 5.41 points, meaning Vinny has quite a ways to go to catch up to his young understudy, who stopped following in his shoes about the time Barry Melrose stopped coaching the Lightning. Funny how that worked out, isn’t it?
Inevitably, the comparisons between the two have to stop, because it’s like comparing apples and oranges... a zesty orange filled to the brim with vitamin C to keep you healthy, and a rotten apple rife with worms and brown spots after taking one too many tumbles over the years.
Lecavalier isn’t really guilty of much. As of the end of the last season, he has the most points of anyone taken in the 1998 draft, so he came very much as advertised as the best player available that year. Of course, when the team’s owner at the time, Art Williams, declared he would be the Michael Jordan of hockey it raised expectations up to a certain point. For God’s sakes, Lecavalier hasn’t even been the Scottie Pippen of hockey, but the same last name sure does fit.
