Sens 5, Canes 1: A Win Of Heartbreaking Magnificence

God that was beautiful. And also incredibly sad.

When this miserable excuse for a season finally reaches its merciful end on April 10th, we'll look back on this game and ask why. Why couldn't they play like that all the time? Why did it take 41 games to finally show us how good they could be? Why didn't they want to?

Will I see a repeat of that team, my team, tomorrow night in Atlanta? I haven't a clue. And if you held a gun to his head, I'll bet Coach Craig would admit he doesn't have one either. The smart money is on no.

But for one glorious game I could close my eyes and all of a sudden it was November 2007. All four lines were rolling, Giggles was flying, Alfie was dancing, Heater, Verms and Fish were scoring, the D was shutting 'em down, birds were singing, the Earth turned on its axis and all was right and good.

Considering how this year has gone, I'm happy to settle for that.

Halfway To The Golf Course! And Joe Corvo Will Continue To Haunt My Dreams

Hey look! Tomorrow night's inevitable beat-down at the hands of the Hartolina Whaleicanes (Remember this? No, of course you don't. Than how about this?) marks game 41 of our 82 game schedule. My stars, how time does fly when one is chewing on drywall to keep oneself from setting fire to...well, everything.

You know what's really fun to do, in a stick-a-hot-poker-in-my-own-eye kind of way? Jumping into the way back machine and reading last year's Mid-Season Review. Wasn't I cute? Wasn't I just adorable, what with the hope and the faith and the total ignorance of what kind of shit pile the next twelve months would be? Yeah...good times. I have a feeling that this year's review may be a tad less rosy. That is if I can keep it from degenerating into nothing but a string of ShitPissFuckCuntCockSuckerMotherFuckerTits. So far, it's proving rather difficult.

Behind Enemy Lines:

Carolina On Ice is the source for all things Whaleicane. Between putting up brilliant posts of his own and moonlighting on one of the best hockey blogs on the tubes, Dave (or as we Spinheads have come to know him, WufPirate) dropped me a line the other day. After paying his respects to Sens Army (and saying ridiculously kind things about the OBC), he was kind enough to provide a scouting report on what we can expect tomorrow:

...They've lost 2 straight to Florida and Boston on the road after ripping four straight wins. They're playing better overall since the return of Ol' One Eye as coach, but this still certainly isn't a team that would be making a deep playoff run. Captain Brindy has the worst +/- in the NHL - the former Selke winner - if that tells you anything. Not really anyone playing with an edge besides Staalsy most nights. Cam Ward has been eating his Wheaties lately with the exception of Saturday's beatdown in Boston.

So, yeah. In other words...we are totally fucked.

Canes 5, Sens 1: Mr. Cojones? My Name Is Joe, And I'll Be Your Waiter This Evening.

Uh-Oh Corvo gets his (presumably) long awaited chance to prove to us that shipping his sorry ass out of town on a freight train was the wrong thing to do (um…the smart money says he won’t)

Some dumbass idiot wrote this on his "weblog" (I'm told this is some new fangled "internet" thingy) about "hockey" a couple of days ago. If you listen closely you can almost here the dessicated corpse of Edgar Allen Poe laughing his bony ass off. Mmmm...finger lickin' good!

The Singular High:

• ♫We only live to kiss your ass...From here on in it's easy street...♫: Mr. Gerber, please rest assured that under no circumstances should you feel the least bit responsible for anything that transpired today. Not at all. Not one iota. Really, your conscience should be absolutely clear. The final shot count (42-17 Canes) demands it. Do you feel better? Do you? You do? That's great. If you need me, or my EgoStroke-a-Matic, I'll be over in the corner, sacrificing rubber chickens to the minor deity that is your fragile psyche. Our Cup shot depends on it.
  

The Lows:

• Irony? Karma? Comeuppance? Comeuppance. Ah, le mot juste!: If Uh-Oh's hat trick wasn't bad enough, even Patty Eaves had to get into the act and spit in our eye with the Canes' first goal. C'mon Patrick, I thought we were cool. I thought we were friends. I didn't want to see you go, and I said so. And this is how you repay our loyalty... Sorry Pat, but I think its time we see other people.

• Five guys on the ice? Well that's just weird: Options for The Bryan: a) teach players that one is less likely to be forced into a couple...several...okay, TEN cheap hook, hold, trip or interference calls if one is in actual motion when encountering an onrushing opponent, or b) just send players to the penalty box every two minutes on a rotational basis while conceding 4 power play goals right from the outset. Come to think of it, this one might be easier.

• The only thing missing was the orange plastic puck: As a nine year old veteran of two, count 'em TWO seasons of tyke hockey under my belt, I thought floor hockey was the dumbest thing in the world. No positional play, nobody knowing what the hell they were doing, just twenty kids rushing into a corner of the gym, falling all over themselves, cheap plastic sticks flailing everywhere until the "puck" squirted out of the pile into the opposite corner, whereupon the mob would go screaming across the floor, only to repeat the process. I hated it. Amateurs, I thought. That probably explains my rather visceral reaction to the way the Sens played this game.

Creamy Middle:

No big mystery here, kids, this was an absolute stinker. Everything we've been in the last three wins, everything we were on Thursday night against Montreal, disappeared. We couldn't chip. We couldn't chase. Hell, we could barely shoot. We didn't hit. We didn't skate. And we sure as hell didn't work. While I'm not overly concerned just yet, what we saw today was a bit of a relapse into the bad habits developed under Teflon's reign and with 9 games left until Go Time, it must be nipped in the bud. Now. With four days until our next game, I have a feeling The Bryan will be pulling out the old Bag Skate manual. Good on him, I say. Last one to puke gets the message.

Up Next:

We're at home in our last non-divisional game of the season, against the Loch Ness Monster of the NHL, the St. Louis Blues. Until you actually see them in the flesh, you're not entirely convinced they exist.

Behind Enemy Lines:

They're prolific. They're passionate. They're hotlinked to MYFO. And they're hilarious. They are St. Louis Game Time. Anybody who puts "Fucking Detroit Since 2005" in their Title layout, is a friend of mine.

Joe Corvo: He Is What We Thought He Was!

The interwebs are an amazing invention aren't they? Just think, ten years ago Joe Corvo could have whined to a local reporter in Raleigh about how those big meanies up in Canada hurt his feelings and no one would have been the wiser. He would have been free to go on his merry way, fleece yet another team who may have the crazy idea that they should get a return on their considerable investment, like he did to the Senators, and the Kings before them. Nobody in his former town would have realized just what a pathetic excuse for a hockey player he really was. Yeah...before the internet, life would have been pretty sweet. Today? Not so much:

Corvo acknowledged that his family didn’t like living in Ottawa and being away from home, but said it had more to do the small-town attitude that surrounded the team and the nature of the criticism.

“It’s hard to understand if you haven’t played in Canada,” Corvo said. “The media here at times can be completely ridiculous, the way they can take some of the stories that are nothing and make something out of them.”

So does that mean you'll be cutting a cheque to the team for some of that $5 million you literally sucked out of us? Yeah, didn't think so, fuckstick.

But wait! There's more! If ever we needed more proof that we sent this ass wart to the right place, it lies with "Josh", one of the commenters on the News Observer story:

Corvo does have a valid point, you know. There are some people who thrive when they have the threat of being lambasted by the media hanging over their heads and there are some players that do not.

Um...Josh? North of the border, we have a name for those "who thrive when they have the threat of being lambasted by the media hanging over their heads". Up here, we call them Stanley Cup Champions.

Lord Stanley's Blog [News & Observer]

p.s.: Big ups to the boys at Battle of Ontario for pointing this out.