It was pretty cool, but I think I'm not the only one who'd say that they're not going to miss having to hear about the impending Winter Classic Carnival Circus Side Show on a daily basis anymore. No more pop ups urging me to buy Classic gear. No more ice updates. Onto the regular regular season.
More important than any of the magic, firsts, or wonder of the event is that the Flyers got a point out of a game they very easily could have written off as a distraction. That means they're 5-3-2 in their last 10 games. And they looked like a real hockey team. Breakaways, real scoring chances that had me out of my seat, good break outs. All very promising.
Tomorrow afternoon the Flyers will take on the Sens. It's an important game and depending on the outcome of the Hurricanes and Rangers game that's taking place right now, the Flyers could be in sole possession of 8th Place in the East after going 5-0-1 on this 6 game road trip. That'd be something to get excited about.
s
Oh yeah. One thing. Did the Bruins have about 9 guys on the ice right before they scored in OT or was that just my mimosas tricking me...
(BOSTON, MA, USA, HOME OF PAUL REVERE, AND HIS HORSE) - Ah the morning of the Winter Classic. I'm going to keep this short as I suppose reading is tough on you right now. I'm not even sure what you're doing here.
Get yourself a drink and settle in for a game you'll have to watch on DVR to remember. Play your music LOUD.
If you want to see what we're up to for some strange reason today we won't be blogging but go to Twitter, even if you're against it or don't use it. You can use it as a search engine without logging in or anything. Just search #Flyers and you'll see what Fran's thinking and drinking.
Short story: Ran into the guys from Broad Street Hockey last night. If you asked me how many ladies they kissed at midnight and I answered "All of them" it would be the understatement of 2010. Man do those guys know how to party.
Real quick, in honor of 2009 pump those jams for your pregame party - Down, Live Your Life, and anything by Coolio! Don't be afraid to spill some of that mimosa! The champagne's only $7.99 a bottle! What would mops do if people didn't spill shit?!?
HAPPY NEW YEARS!! 104 YEARS AGO WAS THE BEGINNING OF WWI. IN 104 MORE YEARS WE'LL ALL BE DEAD!!!
I thought I had died and gone to heaven when half of my row didn't return after the first period. I knew I had died and gone to heaven when James van Riemsdyk's parents hoisted me up on their shoulders and carried me to the bathroom after the second period. I had been hoping the story lines around the Winter Classic would be about the resurgent Flyers, and now I will not be disappointed.
In 2005 I lived at 102 West 29th Street in Manhattan. It was my first stop out of college and when the tour groups of the future go through my re-created apartment they'll be amazed that a prodigy lived in such conditions. In regards to hockey though, it's honestly the same distance from MSG as the Wachovia center is to the Spectrum. That's not an exaggeration. If anything it might be closer. So whe hockey came back, despite knowing better, I signed up for a 10 game ticket pack up in the top level. And I thought I hated the Rangers before.
The first game I went to was a Rangers-Islanders preseason tilt and the first thing I noticed when I turned the corner out of the tunnel and looked up for my seat was the incompressible number of people in non-hoodie sweatshirts with blaring red faces - a bunch of hammered ja-mokes. My sister and I didn't really know the full extent of the rivalry and when the Rangers fans let loose with the first "Potvin Sucks" chant an Islanders fan in a construction helmet next to my sister went up and over two rows at a group of suits that threw a hotdog at his head. Good thing he had the helmet. He hammered down three of them as the little girl on my left watched through cracks of the hand shield her father tried to cover her eyes with. All those guys got kicked out and the remaining 2 hours of the game were filled with only verbal attacks, none physical. But the things they were saying, oh my God.
I only made it to 4 of the 10 games that year. I gave tickets away, I just didn't go some nights. I hated it. The part I hated the most was not that there were shitooned clowns all over but that they were Rangers fans. When that goal horn went off and that stupid ass song came on that they chant along to...a piece of me died every time. No matter the opponent. I've been up top at the Wach and seen similar behavior but felt safer and even laughed at the insults tossed at players on the ice ("Hey Ovechkin, what kind of tank does your mom drive!") Wearing the same colors just put me in a better mindset. Even if there was some off-color behavior and language I could give Flyers fans the benefit of the doubt - they're my people! Double standard I know, but such is life.
Last night me and Ms. Goal Scored By didn't wear our Flyers gear to the Garden. Not because we're scared of being taunted, because if you read this blog regularly I feel you know I can hold my own in a battle of wits on passing escalators. But because we didn't feel like being harassed. Being screamed at about your sexuality, having your significant other berated but other men - those things put you in a position that border on requiring action beyond words. Stupid movie, great quote:
"In peace, nothing so becomes a man as modesty and humility, but when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with rage and lend the eye a terrible aspect."
So when I instinctively applauded at Blair Betts goal I was flagged as a spy by those around me. When Claude Giroux scored to make it 3-0 I got a good old "fuck you" from the fresh off happy hour Blackberry-checking almost trader that would have been in a private box had his game occurred at the beginning of the decade. When they came back after the first intermission one of his more sensible friends had switched places with him.
I was so pleased with the Flyers because I didn't have to say anything to anyone. When Simon ended the game off the second period puck drop everyone in the building was rooting against the Rangers. The tickets were a Christmas present and the Flyers made them one of the best presents I've ever received by coming out and playing hard in a rink that I despise going to. During the third period the building was less than half full. My friends had left and people with kids trickled down from the higher up seats just to get a closer view of hockey. Loss, win…hockey.
Gagne's hat trick saw one hat thrown onto the ice. I wanted to throw mine up, shoot it with a shotgun and crow I was so happy. But as the clock ran down I finally realized I wasn't in heaven when Simon didn't wear that hat instead of his helmet for his next shift.
Going to that kind of game is what makes creates hockey fans. Just like golf. We were part of that perfect shot and now that we have that taste, or in this case it was rekindled, we're going to be looking for it anxiously until it comes again. I'm excited about the Flyers again.
While the Flyers were busy thumping the Rangers in NYC last night the Phantoms were doing the same upstate in Albany to the River Rats. Although the score wasn't as lop-sided as the Flyers game the Phantoms out shot the Rats 42 to 19 in a night filled with fisticuffs. Well, more hugging and falling that actual punching, but there were 6 fighting majors and Patrick Maroon was knocked unconscious by Jimmy Superfly Snooka in a scrum in the first.
But it was late in the game when the in-rink production team and the players had two different things in mind that left Logan Stephenson and Zack Fitzgerald in a funny, if not sexy position for all the romantics to witness:
That's what I like in a defenseman. Not afraid to get in your face. With his lips.
We actually were in attendance at the Rangers game last night and it was nice to meet a few of you that stopped by, and it was extremely nice to sit in the vicinity of a giant man with an Everett 62 Flyers jersey on that kept all the Rangers fans in our corner of the building respectful. More to come on my time behind enemy lines later in the afternoon.
After a couple days we get one hell of a barn burner tonight as the Flyers battle the Rangers up in New York. There are two huge points on the table tonight at the Garden. This game should get you way more excited than any outdoor game in Beantown ever could. This is a game against a hated rival that's two points up on us in the conference. A win tonight gets us right back into the mix. A 4 game win streak, no matter the opponents, is difficult to do in the show. Getting us above .500 with a playoff spot right in front of us before the end of 2009 would be a huge accomplishment for a team that looked dead in the water in December.
Friday looms large, but tonight is what matters. Sure, the quotes are out there. Lavvy and co. are hell bent on focusing on tonight only. That has to be bullshit since you can't escape something as big as the Winter Classic when it's only 48 hours away. Guys have bought their family tickets, their old buddies are flying into Boston, Jeff Carter is kissing every wife on the team, parents are calling about getting lost down in Faneuil Hall. Can you imagine what their voicemail is like this week? We here at FGSB are hoping that all that nervous energy for Friday is in fact brimming over...for that can only mean the Orange & Black will be buzzing from the get go. Mixing that excitement with a dash on confidence from a 3 game win streak should bode well for the Flyers tonight.
Walking over the Rangers won't be like taking a game from Carolina or Tampa Bay. The Rags have had a workmanlike approach to games after coach John Tortarella went all apeshit during a press conference. Dropping Chris Drury to the fourth line and playing a lot of young forwards has the team competing at a high level. The blueshits (not a typo) just lost Vinny Prospal for a couple weeks due to a bad knee, so look for ex-Hab Chris Higgins to lineup with Brandon "I h8 Mike Richards" Dubinsky and Marian Gaborik. The scariest part of the Rangers however is the Sweedish King, Hank Lundqvist. Dude is legit. The part that scares me about playing Lundqvist is the guy loves facing a lot of shots. One team that loves throwing pillows at opposing goalies is the Flyers (see: Carter, Jeff) We need to attack Lundqvist with some greasy play in the first 10 minutes. Throwing him off his game will be paramount to securing two points tonight. I expect a Carbomb to detonate right in front of the crease at about the 5:00 mark.
The first meeting, which took place a little over 2 weeks ago, saw a Flyers team more concerned with shoveling their expensive cars out of the South Philadelphia snow than winning a hockey game. Tonight, the focus and energy will be there. Shit's about to get real. If the Flyers play they way they have in the past 3 games, they'll put themselves in a great position headed into the Winter Classic. Not to add anything else to this powderkeg or a regular season deathmatch, but this is the most important game of the season. Period mark.
How's that for excitement? All caps, eh? eeeehhhh?
Just wanted to drop you a note to remind you to print out a copy of our Winter Classic Survival Guide. Looks like you're going to need it as you'll be spending most of your time indoors. Hoepfully not, but maybe so:
There are still rooms available on Hotwire in Quincy Market, Brookline, Cambridge,and off the Common that won't leave your butt hole sore.
Also, over the past couple weeks we've been able to develop this app for your iPhone that will let you know where in the city most Flyers fans are by gathering anymetadata with the word "Flyers" in it that is coming from a mobile device. Pretty cool huh?
Best part is it's free so if you have an iPhone pick it up!
Let me firstly say that we like Jeff Carter a lot here. Let me secondly say that he will always be on our trading block.
We were one of the few genius 3.0's pleading with the Flyers to shop Carter around over the summer. And then again two weeks into the season. Although we like him we're not sure he's ever going score 46 goals again. I don't need to get into it for the umpteenth time, but defensemen across the NHL have seemed to catch onto Carter's rip-roaring wristers from the boards trick shot.
Now, a team that has a potential big weapon to deal is the Atlanta Thrashers - in two months' time they're going to be in a pickle. With contract negotiations with their Russian superstar hitting a snag earlier this month they need to move him before the trade deadline. I don't care if they're first in the Southeast by March, the Thrashers are not going to win the Cup and need to learn from the Panthers mistakes. The Panthers could have, and should have, had an entirely new second line and a #1 pick for Jay Bouwmeester and instead they got Jordan Leopold. Give me a break.
So we've got them where we want them. And where we want them is giving us Ilya Kovalchuk for Jeff Carter straight up.
I understand that Kovalchuk wants over $10 long-term next year, and that the Flyers aren't in the position to do that. But they could be in the position to take on Ilya's $7.5M cash hit and $6.4M cap hit for the rest of this season in exchange for the goal every other game that he would provide. Kovalchuk is a big, offensive dynamo. His goal totals since the lockout are 52,42,52,43, and even this year after missing a couple of weeks with a broken bone in his foot he's on pace to hit 50. Shit, he even wears number 17.
Carter on the other hand stands to make $5M cash this year and $5.5M next year, with a $5M cap hit in both. He has 14 goals this year but how many of them have helped us win? He's had two 2 goal games during blowouts and two during 4-5 losses. Only the past two games has his production, or lack there of, really helped the Flyers win. He's a player that the Thrashers could sign to a long term deal at a possibly reasonable price.
What you're giving away is the potential of a long term 50 goal scorer, maybe. What you'd be getting, only for one season mind you, is one of the top 3 premier goal scorers in the NHL. If you still think that this team, that team that is coming off a series of lumps and bruises but also regaining opening night form on the roster, is a Cup contender then you have to say yes to this trade.
I'm in a hockey vacuum. And it doesn't make sense.
The Winter Classic is 3 days away. We're in the middle of the World Juniors. There's an international tournament in Switzerland. Olympic rosters are being named. The Flyers, after a horrible losing streak, have managed to string three wins together while up against some pretty significant goaltending injuries and my sister even got me the best tickets I've ever had to a hockey game in my life tomorrow night at MSG.
And I feel nothing.
Maybe there's so much going on I can't wrap my tiny mind around it. Maybe it's because I don't trust hockey anymore after the 5 weeks the Flyers just put me through. Maybe all my therapy sessions spent talking about my time on the 4th line of the JV B team senior year have me wanting to walk away. Maybe I should just have another coffee.
The Flyers are 38 games into the season, that's 46% of the way in. I might be feeling a little Riemsdykian because this is about as far into the tunnel we can get before we're coming out. The week between Christmas and New Years fucks with me usually anyway. So much time spent not at a desk, living real life gets me thinking. And all that can come as a result of thinking are ideas - something that assembly line workers have no need for.
Well, team USA just closed out the first period with a 6-0 lead against the lowly Latvians. I hope they don't try to catch up to Canada in the goal differential column, it's looks like it's going to be possible but would be extremely tasteless.
The International Ice Hockey Federation reported this morning that Oskars Bartulis was named to the Latvian Olympic Team, making him one of only four players on the team who does not already play for the KHL's Dynamo Riga.
Now the IIHF is trying to frame this as some sort of advantage to the Latvians as they'll have the only "team" that's coming into the tournament as a unit. But what they're overlooking is that this "team" is currently sitting in the bottom third of the KHL standings and will be going up against what is basically the equivalent of NHL all-star teams, not Chris Simon and Darcy Verot.
The Latvians are in a better position to avoid a drubbing the likes of the one their younger comrades received over the weekend, but that might just be because NHL players are older, classier, and more mature. Not because Raitis Ivanans hasn't totally been ruled out to make the squad.
Spengler Cup
In other international hockey news Canada is 2-0 in the Spengler Cup, an international tournament hosted by HC Davos of Switzerland that is open to both club and international teams that are invited by Davos. Mark Bell has three goals, Randy Robatille has two assists, and Alexandre Daigle has two goals for the undefeated Canadians, who can clinch a spot in the Championship match with a win over Germany's Adler Mannheim today at 9AM.
s
(UPDATE: OKT has been named to Norway's Olympic squad along with Patrik Thoresen. Even if OKT can manage to stay healthy for the tournament those guys are going to get spanked.)
You can try to convince me all you want that the Canadian World Junior Team's 16-0 shellacking of Latvia in the opening game of the WJC was a necessary evil in a tournament whose second tie-breaker is goal differential. I can try to convince you that you're full of shit and you could give me a log of recent bowel movements, but we'll never see eye to eye. If you end up not advancing to a medal round because you only beat a much weaker opponent 10-0 then so be it. There's no need to humilate a group of amateur athletes like that. And while tonight's 6-0 win over Switzerland seems like a nail-bitter in comparison, you'd be hard pressed to find a classier display of sportsmanship than Toronto Maple Leafs first round pick Nazem Kadri let loose during the third period of a game that was already over:
The player that Kadri is threatening to decapitate is a Swiss player by the name of Nino Niederreiter, an 18 year old transplant with the Portland Winter Hawks of the WHL who made the mistake of hitting the young Canadian "phenom" earlier in the game. Niederreiter is actually a budding star who led the Winter Hawks in scoring before leaving for the WJC with 41 points in 37 games during his first year of major junior in North America. He's projected to be a second round draft pick.
Or was. Before the Joaquin Phoenix of Canada gave the young Swiss star the thumbs down and sentenced him to death.
This isn't even a question of whether Kadri deserves to be punished or not, like Andre Roy was by his own team back in 2007-08 when Riley Cote one-punched him out of the NHL. It's just...who acts like that? You beat two teams by a combined score of 21-0 and you think it's within the realm of the acceptable to motion to a player on one of those teams that you're going to "kill him." Not that it's even right to say that it's less appriopriate, because it's never appropriate. But this is even more tasteless. Kadri could later be seen yelling over the score keeper, calling Niedrreiter a bitch.
I guess Kadri is only 19 and has some growing up to do. But one certainty in life is that you never do something like that to someone else. Especially when all the talking that needs to be done is already up on the scoreboard.
Bloguin is the revolutionary blog network specifically focused on helping bloggers get the most out of their websites. We're currently working on building a large network of online communities and hope to expand our blogging coverage to include a wide range of topics.
Advertisers
The Bloguin Network allows advertisers to promote their products and services to our ever-growing number of visitors. We offer both site-specific ad placements as well as the ability to run a network-wide campaign. If you're interested in working with Bloguin to meet your advertising needs, please contact us.
Bloggers Wanted
The Bloguin Network is always looking to expand. We're specifically looking for blogs in the sports, entertainment, and video games field, but are open to adding any type of quality site. If you're a blogger and interested in joining our network, please fill out our application form.
The Bloguin Login
The Bloguin Login gives you full access to everything our network has to offer. Your name and password will work for each and every one of our sites. Signing up is simple, and will allow you to post in all our forums, create member blogs, and access other cool features! What are you waiting for? Create an Account!
RSS Feed 
Bloguin is the revolutionary blog network specifically focused on helping bloggers get the most out of their websites. We're currently working on building a large network of online communities and hope to expand our blogging coverage to include a wide range of topics. 
The Bloguin Network allows advertisers to promote their products and services to our ever-growing number of visitors. We offer both site-specific ad placements as well as the ability to run a network-wide campaign. If you're interested in working with Bloguin to meet your advertising needs, please contact us.
The Bloguin Network is always looking to expand. We're specifically looking for blogs in the sports, entertainment, and video games field, but are open to adding any type of quality site. If you're a blogger and interested in joining our network, please fill out our application form.
The Bloguin Login gives you full access to everything our network has to offer. Your name and password will work for each and every one of our sites. Signing up is simple, and will allow you to post in all our forums, create member blogs, and access other cool features! What are you waiting for? Create an Account! 