fighting goalie time!

if I haven't said this already, the three most beautiful words in hockey are "Stanley Cup Winners." and the two most beautiful are "goalie fight." I posted a good junior hockey one recently, where the goalies fought, along with everyone else, in a line brawl.

then at Puck Daddy today, a fight was posted of goaltenders Steve Summerhays of the Green Bay Gamblers and Nick Pisellini of the Chicago Steel (USHL, American junior hockey). they got penalties and game ejections (and have since received multi-game suspensions). what makes this unusual is that it happened just before the shootout, so their backups had to take over. (if only fans could fight to get out of seeing a shootout...) yes, I'd call it a staged fight, based on the fact that these two have battled before, and are friends off the ice. so this brought out complaints from both hockey fans and trolls in the comments that it makes hockey look bad or whatever. but still, worth a look. warning: shirtless goalie footage!



and last night, in the much-hyped SCF rematch Penguins @ Red Wings game (which I was very tempted to go to, since I could easily find seats for under $50. it's been a long, long time since you could get seats that cheap for the Blackhawks vs the lowliest opponents), right after the Wings won 3-1 and some kind of unpleasantries were going on (I didn't watch this closely enough to judge who's right and wrong here. surely you can find it being argued in agonizing detail at Kukla's Korner, Puck Daddy, etc.), Wings goalie Jimmy Howard got feisty (mercifully, the YouTube link disabled commenting):



ha: "in a city that traditionally has liked fighting goaltenders, Jimmy Howard has joined the list." screenshots from when I watched live:

and of course, now there's this. I didn't join but a FB friend did. I'm not anti-Crosby, just pro-goalies punching people (if provoked).

Penguins-Red Wings action shot, late 1960s

to commemorate the Detroit Red Wings @ Pittsburgh Penguins game on NBC today that got a little bit of hype (but all the Maple Leafs trade news this morning wiped it out as a discussion topic on Twitter!), one of my very favorite shots from the 1969 book Hockey:

 

 

Linesman Willard Norris hangs on for dear life as Pittsburgh and Detroit battle along the boards.

glad I don't have to write sports headlines, #10 in an ongoing series

eh...okay. Shane Doan definitely deserved a headline, though, after the spectacular Coyotes win against the Red Wings tonight, coming from 2-4 with about 90 seconds left in the 3rd to tie it, then winning in overtime. I had this on, it ended just after the Blackhawks game was starting. originally I'd thought I might even go to Detroit today and finally take a friend who moved there to her first game at the Joe, but that'll be later. this would have been a terrific one to see.

the Flames make it to 50! (and beyond)

no, not points this season, though I guess they reached that mark relatively recently. I mean, Calgary was the first team to rack up 50 fighting majors in the 2009-10 season. the next closest was Anaheim Ducks with 43. then the teams played each other tonight and added two fights in the first period (Ducks won 5-4). Flames' previous game was vs. Nashville Predators, who have the fewest FM--a mere 13, one of which was from the McGrattan-Belak fight in that game (Preds won 1-0).

I thought the impressive stat was that Flames have 14 players with fighting majors so far this year. then I noticed Blackhawks have 11--more than I'd have guessed, but some are players who virtually never fight and some are Rockford IceHogs who got called up a few times. ...and I noticed Flames' next game is against the Sharks Monday night. I'll try to actually tune in at the start unlike all their recent games.

continuing my cataloging of recent multi-fight NHL games (then abandoning it after this post):

Canadiens @ Rangers: 2 fights, 2nd period (but one involved Sean Avery)
Bruins @ Kings: 2 fights, 1st period
Devils @ Avalanche: 3 fights, involving 6 different players
Leafs @ Capitals: 2 fights, 3rd period
Ducks @ Kings, 3 fights
Senators @ Rangers, 2 Carkner-Brashear fights in the 1st period

I certainly haven't watched all those, so I'll just include (and thanks for the advice on how to resize these) the only fight that really matters from recent games: a Blackhawks-Red Wings fight from Sunday! I'm pretty sure there are more fights between fans of these teams than between the players...and Versteeg hasn't had a fight since Dec. 2008. right at the end of the first, it's brief and a little bloody, and the WGN 720 announcers (of course here you get the TV ones...NBC! both games NBC has shown live this year had fights) liked this a lot.

at least it doesn't say "Huet and Cry": glad I don't have to write sports headlines, #5 in an ongoing series

no, "Huet and Cry" is better. you can have that one for next time for free, NHL.com, for all the joy you bring me...

Blackhawks shut out the depleted Red Wings in their first Chicago visit this season, 3-0. that's 3 shutouts in 4 games for the Hawks, Huet's 3rd of the season. with Niemi's 3, that means the Hawks have the most shutouts this season. and the best home ice record, though they had that already. and they've beaten all the rest of the Original Six this year. (I saw them beat the other 4 teams, and if I'd seen a standing room ticket for one for this come up, I might have gone.) Huet has that kind of scary smile on his face again, as you see above. I'll post more about it but I have a brief window of time to finally upload my own photos onto my computer (brief = during intermission of the other game I'm watching; learned that I can't have iPhoto and a game going at the same time if I don't want my computer to freeze so badly I have to restart it multiple times. I knew that would happen...)

the HNIC report for 11/21/09

I got this blog finally up and running (i.e., moved nearly all my Tumblr content to Blogger) yesterday, and celebrated with...a Saturday night exactly like my past few. Discovering how to watch Hockey Night in Canada online = precipitous decline of Social Life in Chicago. But it was a good one last night. (And since I'm here now, I can promote my other blog by linking to how I got free beer at my local liquor store. It's relevant--I was drinking some of it last night.)

Capitals @ Maple Leafs and Red Wings @ Canadiens both started at 6:00 Central, but it took a long time for me to find working feeds for those (and I lost the Leafs one for a while). The feed I found for the latter game was in French, the first time I've ever watched sports in French. It's the "LNH"! I'm still learning hockey lingo in English, honestly, so I'm not sure what everything above means. I understood the Boston Pizza ad in French, later. Have I mentioned I'm obsessed with Boston Pizza? That ad was the most exciting part of the game for me, not that the French shouting wasn't entertaining...

The Habs had somewhat surprisingly beat the Caps the night before, and the Leafs had surprisingly beat the Wings two weeks earlier, so I was actually prepared to NOT be surprised if both Canadian teams won last night, too.  I hadn't before tried a screenshot of two games at once, but when both games went to a shootout at the same time, and I noticed it was two games of underperforming Canadian teams wearing blue and white (Habs were in retro jerseys again) versus highly ranked (well, not so much the Wings right now) American teams in red, I couldn't resist.

Canadiens lost. I wasn't rooting for them but against the Wings, of course. Oh well. The 30th-place Leafs beat the 2nd-place Caps. I had a hunch that could happen, even with Ovechkin playing, but I never jumped into the game thread discussion on Pension Plan Puppets, not wanting to jinx it somehow. Then the Blackhawks-Oilers game was on, and I listened to the WGN radio broadcast while watching a feed of the game that ranged from being about 30 seconds behind the radio to about 1:15 behind. Well, at least I don't miss any of the goals that way, which is more than I can say for the games I've attended in person. 

Questionable goal with 0.01 seconds left in the second period. It was overruled (both the Hawks and Oilers SB Nation game threads agreed it should be) but the incorrect score was up for a while, at least on the Oilers site. Oops. Hawks won 5-2 (Toews' first game this season with two goals), and I was so hyper when I checked the standings and saw Chicago 3rd in the entire league (2nd in Western as long as the Sharks keep winning--I had my eye on the Sharks-Ducks game at the same time as the Hawks one) I didn't get around to writing this last night.

glad I don't have to write sports headlines, #2 in an ongoing series

well, “Wings shred Jackets” (Columbus getting defeated at home in a humiliating 9-1 game) isn’t so bad, except it prompts me into dumb questions like “if they’d lost 2-1, would it just be ‘Wings Slightly Damage Jackets with Inadequate Dry-Cleaning’?”  also, is “down” and “Ducks” a pun, or am I just really coat-fixated right now? (I could also talk about how months ago I inadvertently discovered some people have a fetish for women in puffy/down coats, but never mind.) anyway, not that I’d celebrate a big Red Wings win like that, but the Jackets losing and Hawks winning meant THIS came up online that night:

#1 in Central! #3 Western! #8 overall! it was all true two days ago, anyway…

what women want, apparently

I couldn’t find a feed of the Canucks @ Red Wings game tonight (I watched substantial amounts of 5 others…odd that I could only find a Florida broadcast of the Panthers @ Bruins game; it was the first NHL game I’ve watched with no score till the shootout [I had the misfortune of being at an AHL game where that happened], and the feed ended early so I didn’t even realize Bruins lost), so all I’ve seen is this fight, which obviously brightened these women’s day. (Wings won, too)

a scene from Joe Louis Arena

The Canadian Press, 11/4/09, via The Hockey News:
The team asked fans at Tuesday’s game against the Bruins to stand to be filmed for a commercial holding signs that read: “Hockeytown - No Limits.” If the camera panned some sections, it would’ve filmed some empty seats. The announced attendance was 19,167 in the 20,066-seat arena.

“It’s not a bad crowd for a Tuesday night,” senior vice-president Steve Violetta said Tuesday night, standing in one of Joe Louis Arena’s empty suites. “Our season-ticket sales are down slightly, so we’ve had to be more aggressive with group sales and creative with nine-and 19-game plans that have flexible payment options that can be spread over six months. A few years ago, we were competing with other teams and entertainment options for discretionary money. Now, we’re competing with bread and milk.”

...okay, this was BEFORE the game and this section (where I sat) nearly filled up. the quote is still applicable; it was depressing to see 1000 empty seats at an Original Six matchup where tickets cost far less than at any matchup of those teams in another arena (i.e. I’m not sure I can afford to see the Bruins or Red Wings in Chicago)

first hockey road trip

for 2009 was Tuesday, so I missed a day (or two) posting here. I didn’t actually have being somewhat loopy on Molson and waiting around at the Detroit Greyhound station at midnight while reading a book about hockey fighting on my life list, but—it’s checked off now! oh, and the Red Wings won (vs. Bruins), dammit. so did the Yankees, dammit.