One Quick Rant

i realize that i've been through a period of relative blog silence recently, and for that i apologize to those faithful readers who so sorely miss my quick wit and random ranting. i have no real explanation for my lack of posting other than i just haven't felt the urge, that pissed off or super excited feeling that leads to most of my posting. my last few blog entries have been a little half-hearted and rushed, so i will strive to make this a good one... and one about hockey, which i haven't been writing much about as of late.

actually, there isn't a whole lot of ranting that i can do about hockey right now. both of my teams (the flyers and the ice pilots) are doing pretty well right now. the flyers lost to nashville saturday night in a shootout (the flyers' first of the season), but man was that ever a great game. i watched it sunday morning (which was necessary, as the pilots played at home last night, and the game was delayed an hour). nashville so does not suck this year. acquiring paul kariya was the best move they could have made, as he is as impressive as ever. the predators' sole objective in the game seemed to be shutting down simon gagne, which they accomplished. however, they couldn't stop the two mikes (knuble and richards) and derian hatcher (whom i don't really like) from scoring. the flyers and the predators seemed very well matched overall. antero niitymaki and thomas vokoun were both excellent in goal, but niitymaki's relative inexperience with NHL snipers showed a bit in the shootout. paul kariya totally had his number. the loss was a bit disappointing, but it was an exciting game anyway.

as usual, the ice pilots give me a little more to bitch about than the flyers do. that's not to suggest that i'm as pissed off about their performances as usual, though. their record over the past week or so has been vastly improved, although they are once again below the 0.500 mark with a win percentage of only 0.474. however, i can hardly complain about their winning 2 out of 3 over the weekend and having actually managed to put together a three-game winning streak over the past week, particularly when i consider that this team once had a win percentage as pathetic as 0.250. i guess it's a good thing the pilots played sucky bakersfield three times this weekend instead of a team that's actually good. the condors played a pretty tight game against the pilots, though. the high point of the weekend (for me, at least) was probably adam courchaine. man, is that guy good. he's a great playmaker and a great finisher. we can definitely give deep thanks to the houston aeros for assigning him to pensacola.

and now for one quick rant. there was an awful lot of dirty play going on in pensacola this weekend, by both bakersfield and the pilots. pensacola has a very small team this year, and bakersfield's players are lot bigger than ours. the condors used their size to their advantage, too... illegally. they repeatedly pushed our small guys (which is about half the team) down and held them there, laying on top of guys when they collided and forcing our guys to their knees. little dallas steward and jacquo both seemed a little pissed off about their rough treatment, though steward was the only one of those two to take a penalty for it. jacquo just took out his aggression via legal hits. saturday night in particular was rough for jacquo. the best example i have of his mistreatment took place in front of ryan cyr, as one of the condors (i don't remember which one) got his stick up in a hooking motion that hit jacquo at about nose level (so that could have been called either hooking or high sticking) then hooked him again around the waist... and neither infraction was called by the ref. slashes also abounded without being called, and shaun landolt carried out several of these himself. i've decided that he's not that great. maybe he just had an off couple of nights, but i've lost count of the number of times that jacquo made a great pass to landolt only to have landolt do something really stupid instead of shooting... or shooting about three feet high every time he did manage to get a shot off. landolt does have some value as a physical presence, but i was not impressed with him this weekend. our dear captain also was less than impressive, but that is becoming a trend with him, so i wasn't that surprised.

all right, guys. i'll try to put more thought and feeling into my posts in the near future, and keep the random quizzes to a minimum.