Even The Times Wants To Know Why We Sucked

As we settle in for an evening of Habby goodness (C'mon Carey. A debt needs to be collected, even if it is 19 years old. Go Hextall on somebody's ass. You know you want to.), I would like to draw your attention to a quaint little exercise in self-flagellation, courtesy of the Gray Lady and my inbox.

"Laments of the Vanquished", they called it. Nice. Lends a lovely gladiatorial tone don't you think? If you didn't know any better, you'd think the Sens actually played a hard-fought series. Shhhhh...Don't tell 'em.

On another, slightly more painful note, my season recap is on the way! I just have to herd my infinite number of monkeys back to the steno pool.

Go Hockey! (© FHF)

Habs Win! Ensuing Victory Riot Will Follow The Usual Route

There are abiding truths we Canuckistanians cling to, mythologies that burrow their way into our souls until they become part of the very fabric of our national identity. One of these is that the city of Montreal is the very embodiment of suave sophistication, the last bastion of Euro chic, where the prevailing mood is urbane and daring (for contrast, another of these is that Toronto is...um...well, Toronto). Never afraid to try new things, or risk ridicule from the rest of the nation, Montreal remains the symbol of brash self-confidence with a dash of snooty debonair.

So, we shouldn't be at all surprised over what happened last night following the Habs' win over Boston. After all, this is the town that took Edmonton's small foray into civil disobedience following its '84 Cup (a few smashed windows on Jasper Avenue...oh the horror!) and two years later showed those western hayseeds (amateurs!) how to do it up right! The '86 Cup "celebration" was an absolute bacchanal of destructive mayhem, an explosion of orgasmic smashing the likes of which had never been seen before. "Hah!", they seem to say to the rest of us. "Ve are Mont-ray-ale! Ve are betteur zan yu stodgy Heenglish!" Just to prove the point, they did it all over again seven years later, only bigger and better (incorporating the now de-rigeur drunken frat boy hanging from the power lines was a nice touch).

But then the rest of the world caught on. Now there were riots everywhere, for every major Championship! Cup wins, Cup losses (Hi Vancouver!), Super Bowls, World Series, NBA Finals (or as basketball fans prefer to call it: just another Saturday night). It had become so pedestrian, so predictably every-man, so...gauche.

But now...everything has changed. Again. We need no longer wait for an actual Title, but are free to set the world on fire following every playoff series win! My God! Who knew? (In loving tribute, Ottawa, I fully expect our first pre-season win next year to be met with wanton jaywalking and several strongly worded letters in the Op-Ed pages.)

So thank you Montreal! While some may frown upon your exuberance and youthful enthusiasm, don't ever change. We love you. We love you for once again reestablishing yourself, with the able assistance of a few inebriated pioneers, as the very essence of trend setting urban behaviour. While the rest of the world contents itself with the mundane, waiting as it does for actual "championships" before it unleashes it joyous destruction, the wondrous metropolis of Montreal, that beautiful, wretched, panting, heavily mascaraed, fantastic whore of a city, has shown us up for the unsophisticated, provincial sod pounders we really are, and we stand in awe of her.

Oh, Bloody Hell

It never fails. Whenever I've wanted to take a little break...take a breather...rest my weary bones as it were, Ray Emery goes and says something stupid to drag my once infuriated but now merely exasperated ass back to the keyboard.

Not content to let his season's body of work speak for him from under the wreckage of a destroyed dressing room, our Ray-Ray decided that he would avail himself of the media presence during Packing Day in order to ensure we fully understand why we think he's a petulant, self-absorbed man-child who should never, under any circumstances, be entrusted with so much as a lemonade stand, let alone the Title hopes of an expectant populace.

If goaltender Ray Emery has indeed played his last game with the Ottawa Senators, he's not leaving quietly...Queried on whether he was unfairly held responsible for the Senators' late-season slide and became a distraction because of his mediocre play and lax practice habits, he responded: "Well, I don't take responsibility for the team losing in the playoffs, I'll tell you that much."

Of course, technically speaking, he didn't. After all, he hasn't played a game since Teflon was canned.

But here's the thing Ray. Any Sens fan who has been paying even the slightest attention (and I count myself as one of them) knew our Championship season actually ended three months ago, the humiliation-by-sweep being merely the logical conclusion. And that's all on you, fuckstick. We know it, The Bryan knows it, and I have a feeling that someday in the not so distant future when you're sitting around sharing pints and dodging pool cues with your new ECHL buddies in some Biloxi biker bar, you'll figure it out too.

Other gems in today's Ray-Ray hit parade:

"I showed up late for practice twice this year and had an opportunity to come on the ice. I was just late coming to the rink and they told me to go home ...When some other guys are late coming to the rink, they're just fine or whatever happens."

That's probably because they didn't subsequently mail it in during that same practice.

"I think it's media coverage that, you know, there's not really a whole lot in Ottawa going on other than this hockey team."

Yep, nothing says "I absolutely see the error of my ways and would love the opportunity to come back and work harder than I ever have in my life so that I may redeem myself in the eyes of the organization and its fans" like calling the fan base a bunch of cud chewing hicks easily swayed by an obviously biased media.

It will cost the Sens roughly $1.7 million against the cap, spread over the next two years, to buy out this jackass's contract. Money well spent, I'd say.

I'll give The Bryan the sweet, sweet last words on this sad sack affair (as spoken at this afternoon's presser): "My plan is not to have him back."

Now go away asshole, and give me my break back.

Emery Lets Loose [Ottawa Citizen]
Murray Says Emery To Go; Spezza And Heatley To Stay [TSN.ca]

Pens 3, Sens 1 -- Time For A Little Downtime

I suppose posting a Creamy Middle about last night is rather pointless. If you're reading this (from either side of the fence) you already know what happened, and why (and if not, my interweb friends here, here and here will be happy to fill you in). Besides, it would be a litany of the same things I've been saying since December, and truth be told, I'm running out of funny ways to say "Here's why we suck".

I'll be taking a few days off now. When you think about it, I've been staring at this screen almost every night, pretty much since the season opened in October. It's a wonder I'm still married (um...I am still married, right Beloved? Hello? Anybody home?)

I'll be back with a final Totally Half-Assed Season Recap along with the requisite Keep 'Em/Trade 'Em/Stuff 'Em In A Steamer Trunk and Banish Them To The Outer Moons of Jupiter review of the roster, probably next week sometime.

In the meantime, I would encourage all of you to jump, with both feet, onto the Habs bandwagon (HF29 already said we could). Not only are they a fun team to watch, but anything that keeps the Four Habs Fans stripperific and lethally funny posts coming should be embraced and nurtured.

I'll give the last word to our new found Pens pal (BOOOO! LAME!), FrankD at PensBurgh.com. Classy guy. Too bad we couldn't give Pittsburgh enough of a series to see how he'd do under real pressure.

Dear Ottawa,

I could be a complete jerk and give you the "ha-ha" and "you suck" treatment, but I prefer to have more class than that. Besides, there's nothing more to say than what your media has already said since Game One.

Every morning I made it a point to read the Ottawa Sun (online). Your hockey coverage is exceptional, but the faith of the columnists and writers alike seem to be in disparity. That's not to say the media really has an influence on a team's performance, but could it hurt to just show a little support?

Case and point: we all know a healthy Ottawa team would've been downright scary. I don't know what the contract situation is with Gerber but you guys better hold onto him. He's not the reason Ottawa lost; your lack of offensive production is to blame for that. Even still, Gerber is only one man (and closer to a machine at that).

It's been fun sharing the postage-free letters with SLC, and we've already talked of continuing the new found tradition into next season.

Rest up Senators, you'll have your chance for redemption. Pittsburgh and Ottawa have a date in Sweden at the end of September.

And one more thing. Please don't bring along the half-naked Spartan Warrior guy - we wouldn't want to get your trusty editor SLC too excited.

It's been fun.

See ya next season,
FrankD
Pensburgh.com

Stick that in our Stockholm and smoke it.

It's Not The Fall That Hurts. It's The Sudden Stop At The End

Anyone who didn’t realize by the end of December that this was exactly how this season was going to end was either blindly optimistic or hopelessly naïve. One thing is certain, those folks haven’t been watching very closely.

We never got it back. This team lost everything, its confidence, its swagger, its resilience just before Christmas and we never got it back. It’s as simple as that. And everything The Bryan tried turned to shite. Fire the coach? Nope. Trade for Commodore and Stillman? Nope. Finally send Rayzor into the dark hole of obscurity he so richly deserved. Nope and nope.

We can try and use Paddock, or injuries to key players or any number of bad breaks as ready made excuses, but that’s all they are. Excuses. The truth is they weren’t good enough. They didn’t skate hard enough. They didn't hit hard enough. They couldn't score, and they couldn't stop the other team from scoring. Despite all of the platitudes repeated over and over all season long, the same mistakes were made by the same people over and over again. And they were our supposed “stars”. Redden, Meszaros, Gerber, Emery…

There will be time enough in the next few days to pick at the scab and come to grips with the question of how exactly a season that started so strong could come to this. But for now, we’ll have to settle for the obvious. A group of incredibly talented athletes started to play badly, and none of them thought to work hard enough to fix it. Worse, they didn’t seem to care enough to try.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Avian Overlords

I will mention it here, and only once. We will be paying for that opening "act" for a long, long time. It wasn't bad enough that we are ridiculed league wide as a soft team who hides behind their mother's skirt at the first sign of a playoff belch (and then proceed to prove the peanut gallery right by playing in just that way...but more on that in a bit), but now...well consider the following exchange:

"Hey, Bob! The wife and I are spending some time in Ottawa!"

"Really? Do me a favour will ya? Find out what the deal is with that Pillsbury dough-boy with the leather diaper and the Bissel mop on his head. You know, the one with the stutter."

So as you read the taunting words contained in this, our last (if the Gods are kind to us) missive from our new friend FrankD of PensBurgh.com, keep in mind that, while his strangely homo erotic closings are a bit awkward (yet strangely flattering) we deserve every single searing word. Our egregious sin in the eyes of Man, God and a vast majority of the world's stage directors demands it.

Dear Ottawa's Finest

Please do me a favor - don't kick off Wednesday night's festivities with that scantly clad dropout actor from the movie 300. That was by far one of the cheesiest thing I've ever seen, and I've seen some big cheese. The least you could've done was make sure his audio worked properly.

But I will say - you guys sure can sing. Nice work on the anthem. I'll always admire the dual anthem introduction.

It really looked like you guys wanted to play hockey on Monday night. I mean, you came flying out of the gate like Rosie O'Donnell at a buffet line - for the first third of the game at least. To see the second period start at a scoreless tie really irked me. But I knew the Pens would come around soon enough.

Ottawa, as you may have noticed, score first. Some guy I never heard of. Was that one of your B-Sens call-ups? I'm just curious. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter much. Especially since the game's hype was focused around Spezza and Alfreddson playing injured/returning from injury, respectively. Funny thing is, I don't recall their presence on the ice.

I saw Hossa though. Remember when you guys had him? I also saw Crosby and Malone and Talbot. All of these guys hit the board with a point or more. I didn't see your stars do much.

Oh yeah - Spezza got a pity assist.

I could continue rambling, but really what's the point? This debacle and sad excuse for a playoff series ends Wednesday night. Perhaps if you're nice Pitt will hand you one out of pity and shake hands at center ice in Pittsburgh. That'd be a nice playoff image.

Polish off those golf clubs.

One love,
FrankD
Pensburgh.com

Be sure to check in on his site from time to time. I'll be sending him my witty retort shortly. Just as soon as I figure out how to apologize grovel surrender maintain a semblance of dignity.

Peacefully at home, following a long illness. Cherished son of Bryan and Roy (nee, Mlakar), beloved father of Hope, Destiny and Desirée. Sadly missed by 18 of 23 brothers.

Born October 3rd 2007 amidst great expectations, falling victim to a debilitating and chronic ennui in mid-December, finally succumbing after a brave and ultimately futile effort at recovery through late winter and early spring.

Friends and family may call with their condolences Wednesday, April 16th, 7:00pm to 10:00pm at 1000 Palladium Drive, Ottawa. Funeral services Thursday, April 17th, 12:00pm. Family only please.

In lieu of gifts, donations to the Canadian Cancer Society and University of Ottawa Heart Institute would be appreciated.