It's All My Fault - Oilers 4 Habs 1

Ryan Jones said the crowd was 55% Oilers fans...meaning 20% of Oilers fans were wearing a Habs jersey, for some strange reason. And yes, my camera had a few beers so it's a bit blurry. I miss GG too.

Fuck. It's my fault.

That's the third Habs' game I've attended here out west, and the first in Edmonton. Same result in all three: the Habs don't show up. What's worse is the game was f'ing BORING save for the in-house crowd battle cries of Lets Go Oilers! vs. Go Habs Go! for most of the evening. There was some effort, but no emotion and little skill outside the Oilers crease.  Although I did see Bit Tits smile during the warmups and thought for sure he was going to score. Then I remembered Count Chokula is his coach so that feeling will be gone half way back to the bench. Guess what? Another big fat goose egg. Trade 'im already, you know the Count wants to.

I spent the entire third period trying to figure out another excuse for the loss besides me. Injuries? Okay, when you've got a basketball player on defence (Nash) and one of the three vets goes down 7 minutes in, your defence is allowed to cause trouble. But the Habs didn't win for lack of defence - save for that 15 second comedy of errors early in the third. (I love you PK, but when you got a guy lined up just outside the blueline MAKE SURE YOU HIT HIM.)

And while TFS (tm) wasn't the problem, he was

certainly outdueled by a dude who could play his grandfather in the HBO production "Habs/Oilers 24/7". (But man is Carey a fine specimen to observe during warmups if you fancy yourself a puckstopper. And he's durable, unlike the fossil across the ice and the Dmen in front of him - AND a certain former crease buddy who was recently put on the IR...but still love you, Jaro!)

Maybe the Habs don't like the West? Well, granted that both Edmonton and Calgary are boring as hell compared to life in the MTL, but there are enough western boys that you'd think they'd know what to expect. And the flip side is they can't claim that they were distracted by the prospect of the cities' nightlife. And surely they were not distracted by those Octane Whores  (*TM Mrs. Panger) "dancing" in the aisles - because you could pick out a random group of females from any Montreal club and get a hotter - and better coordinated - bunch.

But really, it all came back to me. The common denominator is me. And the rest of the Canadiens extended family who have left Montreal. The club knew we were coming (how could they not?), knew we were all psyched to see them - and they consistently shit the bed out West. Is it a feeling of betrayal because a couple of generations earlier the Habs were Canada's Western team (no one outside T.O. has ever enjoyed the Leafs, obviously)? And now these young upstarts - with their "Great One" and tiny collection of Cups and teams stolen from Georgia and goalies stolen from St Leonard - have their own fans? Meanwhile the Montreal team is punishing us for joining these losers (albeit Cup contending losers in Vancouver this year) and abandoning La Belle Province altogether.

Or is it because they get too much love: they know that I and my legions of former Montrealers-but-still-diehard-Habs-fans will pay to see them play even if they lose 10-1 here every time. And we'll even show up for warmups to take crappy, blurry pictures.

Or maybe it's Paul Mara's fault. Keep your equipment carry-on goddamit. You're 6'4, don't tell that 5'2 bitch of a stewardess what you can and cannot do with your stuff.

Well at least it didn't get any worse - oh wait, what's that Wiz's face is telling me from it's hospital bed? Enjoy this shot of The Phantom of Rexall Place back when he had an orbital bone and his basketball playing cousin (sorry, I got nothing else for this Brendon kid yet).

Now cross your fingers for the Heritage Classic: not for a win - we know that's futile! - but for better than    -20 weather so I don't have to pull a James Franco impression and amputate a limb halfway through the third.

Comment me!

Bahh, It's a Stupid Name Anyway - Ducks (...pssshahahaha) 3, Habs 1

While Anaheim and Montreal skated around the pond for a rather dull game last night, I tried to think long and hard about the better ducks out there in this world. Then I concluded by thinking that ducks are kinda like the Indians in Hollywood movies - wanting to be hip and calculated yet inherently socially awkward and clumsy, and cursed by a missed-the-mark virility (that's what the movies want you to think, not me, call off the defamation suits, what the hell sue me I'm a lawyer, I have Indian friends), ....(ok not really friends more like acquaintances).

Think about it. Take a look at these ducks.

Daffy: Terrible lisp. Sounds like Bryan Murray. I don't care how smart you are, you're coming across as a 7-year old with a sugar rush.

Donald: The cooler duck. A wanna-be suave. Kind of like the James Bond of ducks. But he's still a geek and every Disney character would bone him last if stranded on a desert island with other Disney characters and Jurrasic Park dinosaurs (1st movie).

Howard the Duck: Uber nerdy, tried to bang Lea Thompson. The only other character who tried to get into her pants was that creepy dude from Back to the Future. Howard is responsible for one of the most disastrous bits of fiction ever committed to film.

The Aflak Duck: The Keanu Reeves of ducks. Kinda cool at first but you soon come to notice that his thin acting skills fail to veil his dense persona. I'm sure he gets the chicks but they usually go home with that dirty feeling rather than a sense of jubilation. They screen his calls afterwards.

Losers. All of them. Sure some of them may have hatched prematurely. Some of them just had it rough from the beginning. Some learned to waddle late, some refused to eat on their own, insisting their parents continue to vomit the food in their mouths. Some lost everything in the dot com bubble. Some said, "Hey, laser discs! That's a great idea!" I know, it's not right to judge. But look, I'm just calling them how I see them.

Sure, Anaheim can skate rings around most teams in the NHL, but at the end of the day no player who respects himself`can say" I'm real proud to be a Duck" without feeling his testicles vanish. Really. "I'm proud to be a Duck" - checks for testicles - "phew!!!" - another quick glance to make sure.

It's too bad because the Habs could have left the West Coast with the mental reassurance of having beaten at least one of the top teams in the Conference, with a 3-1 record to boot. But the hostile wildlife in California would eventually have its say, and the Sharks and Ducks can now tell themselves they won't have much to fear should the Habs or Sens make their way across America in June. They sure didn't in June of 2007.

These Ducks, formerly of the Mighty lineage, schooled the Canadiens for 3 periods, limiting them to 12 shots after the first 2 of play. An inspired Kovalev, who finally notched his 30th of the season, couldn't find enough fuel to lead the reunited Kovy-Grabs-Tits trio of love. With a Turtleplek nursing a Turtlecold, the team reluctantly fed Grababybovski to the Ducks. It wasn't enough; Turtlepleck was turtlemissed.

So yes, the name is terribly puerile, but the players wearing the jerseys are not the bumbling buffoons of Disney. Pronger, Niedermayer, (bis), Selanne. All carved out of the trunk of Man. Champs. Nothing Carey Price could stop when Anaheim turned the jets on late in the third to break an endless tie. It was just a matter of the fortress being breached and eventually falling to a far stronger opponent. They play the game the way it was to meant to be played. One thing you can say about ducks: they always mean well. These Ducks insist on being taken seriously.

Pawn to Rook 4, Pawn to Rook 4! Nooooo! Why Don’t You Just Give him the King, Give it to Him! - Carey Price, 6 – Habs, 4

"He taught me the art of giving, as a boy growing up in Bangalore."

Not what you want to christen a west coast swing. In Seinfeldesque fashion, Carey Price’s performances found a way to even themselves out after a great outing against the New Jersey Lemaires and a big poo poo in San Theodore last night.

It was a frustrating game and I could have avoided the whole thing had I just listened to signs from God that found their way into my karma early on – like this one that appeared on my screen about ten minutes into the first period: Attention: Your DVR will automatically enter power-save mode in 5 minutes. Please press any remote key to continue watching TV. This of course always gets me scrambling in a mad frenzy for a lost remote that is mischievously squeezed between two couch pillows, as I anxiously wage war against a panicky countdown that begins in my head.

Mistake number one of the night was finding the zapper. I now wish I had somehow managed to mistakenly stick the remote in the fridge. I would have looked for hours, missed the game and watched Carey Clause in the highlights.

Price found a way to make Brian Campbell look like Bobby Orr and Jonathan Cheechoo like,… Jonathan Cheechoo. Pencil in the Shelley Long special he offered up on a goal from the East coast and the kid would only have needed to air-drop a few bags of rice over scattered villages in Nicaragua to win the Humanitarian of the Night Award.

TFS lost the two points, although it doesn’t help when the team gives up two quick ones when the game is barely 3 minutes old. I guess San Jose likes to skip the foreplay.

At least Montreal showed some character with their signature never say die composure. They came back to tie the game 3 times and could have made it 5 all had they pressed some more. But give credit to the Sharks; they shut Montreal down at the halfway mark of the third period and wouldn’t yield despite giving the Habs a couple of power plays and some daylight to bolster hopes of another tie. On this night, the best penalty kill in the NHL totally maimed its best power play.

Weird game, showered with odd-bounces, a bizarre cadence throughout, and some of the worst officiating of the season. The refs must have thought you only award four minute power plays to Vulcans because the red blood on the bridge of Grabovski’s nose didn't seem to impress them. Not enough to earn the right call. Then a too many Sharks, with the ice looking like the Great Barrier Reef, and yet, somehow, no call. And the one that makes me want to catapult off an Olympic diving board head first into a pile of cement, features Andrei Markov – who may not have amassed twenty words in English during his five year tenure in Montreal - called for an unsportsmanlike by the refs who must have taken offence to one of those twenty words. Unless the officials took a minor in Russian lit, this goes down as THE paradoxical call of the year. These are officials who would call travelling in a basketball game at the Special Olympics.

Yeah, just a weird vibe throughout the whole thing, with no team ever managing to set a tone or keep a lead long enough to assume any semblance of control. Broken plays followed one another in sequential disorder. A puck that gave credence to the HP sign over the front door, by morphing into a Hot Potato for three full periods.

I really hated this one, du début à la fin. It provided enough suspense to keep you interested while merely offering an unsettling Crying Game cringe on revelation of the end result. Did I really have to navigate through the broken plot for this bitter end? A game that steered itself to conclusion like the end of a John Grisham novel. Shoulda known better.

Shoulda left the remote in the fridge.

P.S: The title? An SNL sketch featuring Jim Belushi as a chess coach with a Bobby Knight temper. Best line: “Some people say I lost control that day. But when you’re down two pawns, you gotta do something.”Gold.