Instigating again...

They look so CUTE from a distance


(from The Instigator at cbc.ca)

Gripe Day

Like he was reading my mind (or maybe just my blog), Walton tossed up an article from ECHL.com on Gordon that's worth reading for kicks. Just be warned that one of my first reactions was "Oh holy hell, I can't get hired for hockey communications and this hack with awful grammar and no proofreading skills did?" I don't for a minute believe that Gordon actually said "I had not sympathy for here." I could believe that he said "I had no sympathy for her," but "not sympathy for here?" Come on.

My other gripe of the day? It's kind of roundabout, but it turns out that Army and Crush both actually played enough games with the Pens in the regular season to qualify for having their names on the Cup if Pittsburgh wins. Of course, just to hang it up, there's a rule that if a player was traded, they're no longer eligible on the old team, regardless of whether the new team's in contention or not.
HOWEVER, because he was a low down dirty Pirate and a Duck callup for all of something like 3 cup games last year, Joe Motzko, Boy Without A Team, is considered a Stanley Cup winner.

Now sure, I like beating on ol' Joe a little more than the next person, but comparatively, Army and Crush put in a hell of a lot more work for the Big Pens to get them where they are now than Motzko did for the Ducks while he was just an AHL-er.

Not that it's gonna change anything, but Army and Crush got freakin' robbed, yo.

And there you have my gripe of the day.


(GO STINGRAYS!)

Bring On the Razors

For those of you who love making fun of Sidney Crosby as much as I do (it's a sisterly kind of abuse, really) you definitely need to check out Going Five Hole's Playoff Beard Watch.

Courtesy of the Toronto Sun Troy Crosby's also realized what I did after my first game in a Pens jersey at the Wachovia. It's a scary scary place. Of course, he's smarter than I am, as he "recently joked that he might need to sport a Philadelphia Flyers jersey at the rowdy Wachovia Center for safety reasons." Yeah, I wasn't ever that smart. Besides, those colors take me back to high school, and I just can't bring myself to do THAT again.

Tonight, I'm predicting a more physical game than we saw at Mellon, with the loving (ha!) support of the Flyers fans behind their team. I'm hoping a good number of Pens fans make the cross-state trek (I sure would have gone half-state, but that whole $$$ thing is killing me right now) just to cheer the guys on, as I've experienced that joy of trying to play a game in a hostile environment myself, and boy does it suck.

Honestly, if the Penguins keep their heads in it and don't let the orange screaming masses get to them, I see no reason they shouldn't be able to keep going the way they have. And if anyone even so much MENTIONS the names Timonen or Coburn, I will personally hunt you down and give you an indian rug burn so bad you won't be able to wear long sleeves for week.

(ECHL Ex-Bears On The Rays-wise, obviously they're not playing Reading, or that'd be all over here, but right now they're not faring well against the Cincinnati Cyclones either. They're currently down 2-0 on the series, and the next game's on Wednesday. Patrick McNeill's out with an undisclosed injury, and Andrew Gordon's keeping his point-per-game streak going.)

Must I Donate Glasses?

That goal was in, you blind sons of pig-dogs. I don't care if Biron's glove WAS over it, you could see the edge of the puck and the rest of the red line, and if you continued it, that puck was WELL over the line, even if it was under Biron's stupid glove. Any well-trained and semi-intelligent monkey could draw the rest of that line and see where the puck was.

That's enough to make me want to punch employees when walking by a Footlocker.

Watching games on TV really just proves to me that I need to live in an NHL town.

Dearest Jarkko Ruutu, how could that NOT have been embellishment? I understand your need to kick Martin Biron in the nuts on some level, but that was, well, obvious.

FLEURY. YOU ARE NOT CONKLIN. NONE OF THIS WANDERING STUFF.

Hooray, Talbot! Downie Soft, please not to be breaking the glass onto our fans expressing your displeasure at your own manhood. You can do that crap in the Wachovia, but not here.


"Lot of long-range shots by Philadelphia" says the announcer man. Just not a lot of long-range accuracy.

Pens 4-2, 2-0 in the series

GO FLIGHTLESS BIRDS

Long time.....

....little hockey. Of course, I'm glad when you get this far down in Stanley Cup Ville Land they deem most if not all of the games worth seeing by those of us broke enough to not have Center Ice. (Not that they'd have let me see it even on Center Ice, as supposedly I'm in Philly's blackout area.... and wow, was that last sentence made of fail, grammar-wise.)

We are also getting perilously close to me having to make good on the (I still claim it was half-drunk) promise that I'd get a Pens tattoo when they won the Cup.

It's also been decided that Colby Armstrong is the patron saint of THTM, so his page at hockey-reference is now sponsored by me. Regretfully, I didn't get to Orpik in time, but a fan of Pensblog sponsored him with the message "Free Candy," so all is not lost.

Now, to figure out what's left in this house for dinner.

Brand me!

I don't know how many of you have heard about http://hockey-reference.com/ at this point, but the gist of it is this... you can sponsor a player site and link your website off of it.

So here's the question... who needs to be the patron sponsored saint(s) of THTM?

At last check, Colby Armstrong, Eric Fehr, Brooks Orpik, Sami Lepisto, and Quintin Laing were still open. I'm open to suggestions off of this list, as well as the concept of sponsoring more than one. Let's keep it to two though, unless you're gonna all chip in as well, because $10 each per player starts getting a little rougher in my current broke state when you've got 5 players to pay for.

Andrew Gordon and Jay Beagle don't exist yet, so no fair voting for them. As soon as they do however, (site creator says AHL later this year, possibly, emphasis on possibly) you can bet that I'm snapping them up. Well, at least Gordon. Maybe I'll leave Beagle for the Dog Pound guys.

Anyway, leave your choice in the comments... act fast, as they're selling quickly!

It's a witch.. burn her!

In case you all haven't been tuning in to the I'm Not A Puckbunny podcast regularly, here's some more incentive. I'm in the last one. Yeah, that's right, you can hear my melodious voice echoing through the halls of your place of employment or residence. Except for the fact that I do a lot of talking and very little processing, so a lot of it is me giving you sidney-crosbyesque sound clips. And i have a cold, so it's like Sidney Crosby with a rather large hairball in his throat pretending to be a phone sex operator (but better the hairball in his throat than on his face)

Of course, you do get to listen to me beat up on Chris Bourque and the Flyers, so it might well be worth it if you're into that kinda thing.