Posted in Recaps October 11th, 2008
Offensive game play and offensive Cup play
I’m happy to say that, grades be damned, I was able to pull myself away from my Cisco textbook to watch some (okay, most) of the Bruins opener Thursday night. Unfortunately, most of the 1st period was marred by lingering images of Def Leppard from the pre-game concert (which I suspect was actually from before the Wings-Leafs game as it was in Detroit and Darren McCarty came out with the Stanley Cup). It took about three songs to realize that, holy shit, that 275 pound mass of humanity really WAS Joe Elliot and not some replacement singer. It’s a shame that it wasn’t some YouTube replacement especially after Elliot pulled THIS Stanley Cup travesty.
But enough about washed up bands, here are some bullet points on the game.
- Overall game play was sloppy, but then again, it *was* the season opener. The first period was especially scary considering the Bruins played most of it in their zone, being outshot 20-5. The defense started to gel after that, but overall Thomas spent way too much time sprawled on the ground doing damage control in front of the net.
- Two of those five shots actually went in, especially a beautiful Kobasew-Krejci-Wheeler goal where they caught the Avalanche in transition. That was especially sweet. There’s a lot of potential here to become an excellent third scoring line. Wow!
- Only two power play opportunities, but Savard scored on one of them. I’ll take the 50% conversion rate while it lasts.
- Maybe I just don’t watch enough hockey (hey, I worked 2nd shift for most of my life) but something happened in the 2nd period which I’ve never seen before: after an Avs shot broke the glass behind Tim Thomas with under 3 minutes left to play, the refs stopped play and called for the intermission then. Don’t know if that’s a new or old rule, but that makes incredible sense. Why stop play for an extended period of time twice within five minutes? So they all went to the locker room while they fixed the glass and drove the zamboni. They came back with 2:47 left on the clock and when the period officially ended, they took a brief break while they changed sides to start the 3rd.
- Michael Ryder and Blake Wheeler with their first goals as Bruins (and Wheeler with his first NHL goal ever). Nice!
- Thomas held his own but gave up a bad rebound in the 3rd period that led to a game-tying Jordon Leopold goal midway through the 3rd period. Manny Fernandez will more than likely get the start Saturday.
- Vs. scared the crap out of me with what I originally perceived to be lack of an HD broadcast. I have DirecTV where they share an HD channel with the Golf channel. According to the DirecTV online guide, the hockey games were only being shown on the standard definition channels. The shared “VSGFHD” channel was instead rerunning a PGA golf event. That’s right, they were choosing to rerun a PGA event (the season ended a few weeks ago) instead of the unofficial start of the hockey season (don’t get me started about last weekends games). Fortunately, it appears Vs. came to their senses between the time they released their planned schedule to DirecTV and the start of the game as when I checked that channel on a whim midway through the 1st period, the Bruins game was being broadcast there in hi-def. Hey, I didn’t spend $1500 on a Sony Bravia to watch the season opener in crappy standard def!
All in all, the Bruins start the season with a road victory. I’ll take it!
This entry was posted on Saturday, October 11th, 2008 at 10:57 am and is filed under Recaps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
