Nov 10, 2013

HypoCHondriacs Anonymous ~ Habs vs. Isles Snowy Sunday and I need some soup Game Preview and Open Thread

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63 comments:

  1. GYFHG

    Still do not know who won the comet bowl, and still dont really care unless someone was decapitated.

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    1. leaf fans are still blaming the refs for, wait for it, gooning broons, head shots and dirty play. Eat shit fuckers.

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  2. Nice ones for a Sunday Moeman

    Go Habs Go!

    Let this streak end tonight with a convincing win!

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    1. A solid team win would be nice.

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  3. Probably won't see the game tonight, but Go Habs Go! Start proving us wrong.

    On another note, I watch a lot of TV. More than I should. Some of it the mindless American stuff - not talk shows or 'reality' tv, but you know the stuff on 'regular' tv stations - shows my wife and kids like, so I tag along because I am extremely lazy and will find any reason to procrastinate rather than doing stuff around the house. ANYWAY, which brings me to the one, most agonizing American word(s)/accent I've really noticed over the past few years. They can bug us about hoose and aboot all day long - there is a small %age of Canadians with that accent, so bug away. But let me tell you this - the second 'd' is not silent in "didn't". It's not di'nt. It's not wou'nt (wouldn't). When I first started noticing it, I'll be honest and blunt here - I thought it was a black thing. But I started paying more attention and now it's like a part of me dies every time I watch TV. I took a public speaking course where they told us to count the 'ums' every time you hear an interview. Can you ever tell when somebody is untrained! Wow. Same thing - I can't help notice these words now. I can't make a drinking game of it - my liver couldn't handle it.
    Anyway, I digress, I di'nt meant to get so off track - just finished watching a show with a lot of silent 'd's going on.

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  4. the Maritimer3:04 PM

    Sick moe? If so, get well soon.

    I've decided that the Montreal Canadiens are moving down the priority list. Sunday night is not hockey night in Canada. The youngest son and I are going to see the new Thor movie tonight.

    I don't know about the rest of you but I sure am tired of watching mediocrity and in a lot of cases an inferior product. I don't know who to blame, maybe there is no blame to be had, it's just the reality of Gary Bettman's parity league. Some teams seem to be able to thrive in it, but the Canadiens are not able to. Last season was an aberration as indicated by the rapid descent the last three weeks of the season.

    The lack of NHL caliber players on the roster, if you look with an unbiased eye, is scary. Looks like it will be some time before the Habs are real contenders again, unless a Datsyuk or Zetterberg falls in their lap like Detroit did.

    Hey! the Alouettes just scored a touchdown! Finally, something to cheer about.

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    1. Feel the flu in my bones. Go Als! GYFHG!!!

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    2. the Maritimer4:15 PM

      Ever get the flu shot? I swear by them, knock on wood, haven't been sick in years.

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    3. Yup. We get them at work. Scheduled to get one on the 22nd.

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  5. There will be no cooking of cats on my watch. Get well soon moe. There's some homemade chicken soup in my freezer at home, please feel free to help youself.

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  6. the Maritimer4:14 PM

    Als = Blech!

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    1. What a crap game by two crappy teams.

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    2. the Maritimer4:45 PM

      Yeah, 3-2 at the half? Seriously? Sounds more like a hockey score. Brutal to watch, half-watch, more like listening to.

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  7. One of Lou's last interviews;

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4giZwTxmeP4

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  8. Its 29º in Havana.

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  9. Thoughts and sympathies to those affected in the Philippines.

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  10. Ugh, Sunday night game? What's that all about? And no Saturday game?

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  11. Beautiful kick up to the stick, beautiful shot. Love that little guy!

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  12. Damn, really felt a shut out coming.

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  13. Apparently interference isn't a thing.

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  14. This is a terrible Isle team with a nobody goalie that played last night. And the Habs are still struggling. Sigh.

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    Replies
    1. Oh, and they're second best player is injured to boot.

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  15. Replies
    1. gCHuk, again with the nice pass.

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  16. Lego! Finally, streak broken.

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  17. 4 mins, cash it bitCHes.

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  18. Oh thank go, DDD is on the PP. We're saved...

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  19. Get up from my desk for 2 minutes...Not complaining!

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  20. They've really gotten lucky that many of these young players have worked out so well. Maybe it's not 'luck', exactly, more like good scouting. Either way I'll take it.

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    Replies
    1. Timmins' draft record overall has been great. gCHuk was his latest diamond pick. KidG, was a diamond in the rough and man is he shining. Also, PFK.

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  21. Wow. Nice gCHuk!

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  22. wow we look like an NHL team tonite

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  23. NYI play by play guy call him SUUE Ban

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  24. 2 points in the bank.

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  25. LOLZ, the TSN recap is like 5 short paragraphs and they have to mention how tired the Islanders are about 6 times. We get it, you hate the Habs. Go back to complaining that the broons are cheap against your leaf, yet are elite superstars that the Habs just can't handle (despite beating them over half the time).

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  26. Some people might think I am not the most religious person in the world, maybe I have my reasons, you are not going to believe this. Lord help us!

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  27. Congrats to Chelios making the hall, if only he could have kept his procreation apparatus in his jock while in Montreal.

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  28. Joseph Steinbock presents an open letter to Gary Bettman, in which he announces his resignation as an NHL fan:

    "Mr. Bettman,

    "I am writing to inform you of my resignation as a fan of the National Hockey League.

    "I am not a johnny-come-lately to hockey. The NHL came to Philadelphia in 1967, shortly before my tenth birthday, and I have been an avid fan ever since. In the early years we watched the few available Flyers games on a low-powered UHF station and tried to fool ourselves into believing we could actually see the puck through the static; the play-by-play man’s primary job at the station was as “Captain Philadelphia,” where he wore an astronaut’s uniform and introduced afternoon cartoons. I attended my first game during the second or third week of the 1969-1970 season and there was a buzz in the old Spectrum the entire game as people turned to one another and asked “Who is this guy Clarke?” We didn’t know a great deal about hockey but we knew we were seeing something special.

    "My parents owned Flyers season tickets through much of the 1970s and into the 1980s, although they eventually surrendered them because there were still kids in the house to put through college. I’ve attended hundreds of games over the years, their ticket stubs placed in several boxes that I sift through every few years in search of sweet memories. I attended the playoff victory over Minnesota during the 1972-73 season on a goal that has been memorialized by the statue of Gary Dornhoefer standing over a prone goaltender that still stands outside the Flyers arena. I was there for the game in which Bill Barber scored his 100th point in a single season, the game in which Ron Hextall scored his first goal, and many, many more.

    "I was there when Rick Foley challenged the entire Rangers bench and only Brad Park had the courage to stand up to him; when back-up goalies Bobby Taylor and Gary Smith played rock‘em sock’em robots at center ice; and when Rick MacLeish scored four goals against the Islanders and my father caught a puck.

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    1. "When I enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, and realized that the Flyers did their pre-season training at the school’s Class of ’23 rink, I spent my time between classes watching the team’s workouts. Even now I live just a few minutes from the team’s practice rink in New Jersey and have visited a few times a year to see the team prepare for its next game.

      "I lived through the Broad Street Bullies days and marched in the second Stanley Cup parade in 1975 (my parents wouldn’t allow me to skip school for the first parade but by 1975 I was a senior in high school and received their approval). Even back then I knew there was something wrong with how the Bullies conducted themselves but my guys were winning, so I did my best to overlook it.

      "Now, when I occasionally search out old Bullies clips on YouTube I’m appalled by what I see and ashamed at my own complicity in what that team did.

      "Those weren’t ordinary, I’m-mad-at-you-so-let’s-just-throw-down-our-gloves fights; they were hired guns chasing down, terrorizing, and pummeling opponents’ skilled players.

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    2. "But what I saw during the Flyers game on November 1 against Washington was the last straw.

      "During that game, as you know – and I know you know because I read a news account of your utterly inadequate response – Flyers goaltender Ray Emery engaged in a fight with the Capitals’ Braden Holtby.

      "No, that’s not quite right: Emery assaulted Holtby – and without provocation. To recap what I saw, several fights broke out in the Flyers’ defensive zone; Emery was not involved in any of them, nor were any of them being waged on the goaltender’s behalf, as is sometimes the case in hockey. Despite his total non-involvement, the Flyers goaltender decided to get involved, so he skated 180 feet, the length of the ice, to initiate a fight with the Capitals goaltender. The Capital was not involved in the altercations on the ice, hadn’t been involved in any altercations on the ice that evening, and had not interacted with the Flyer goalie during the game in any way. The two play positions that keep them 180 feet apart, and if I recall the rules correctly, cannot have any contact in any way because during the course of play goaltenders are prohibited from crossing center ice (except, presumably, to get to their own bench during a delayed penalty call).

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    3. "What possible justification can there be for the Flyer’s actions? He wasn’t involved in the altercation, the Capital wasn’t involved in the altercation, but the Flyer decided that he wanted to fight, for no reason at all, and instead of fighting with one of the players nearby, someone who might be better equipped to defend himself, he chose to skate 180 feet to engage a total non-combatant who plays a position that is normally not expected to engage in on-ice fisticuffs. The Flyer’s ill-chosen actions had nothing to do with sport, nothing to do with hockey, and nothing to do with competition.

      "How is this not assault? Do you not remember back in the 1970s, when a Toronto court convicted three players for their violent on-ice actions and an aggressive prosecutor threatened to do more? Has the NHL learned nothing? Have you, as your comments in the Columbus Dispatch suggest, learned nothing?

      "Now I’m not one of those fans who advocates banning fighting from hockey. Oh, I support such a ban, but I don’t advocate it because I’ve always loved hockey and I realize that once you take the possibility of fighting out of the game, about fifty percent of those who currently attend will disappear permanently and the game could wither and die. I don’t really accept the notion that the players police themselves through fighting, although I admit, I recall one of those international tournaments in the early 1980s when notorious non-combatants Marcel Dionne and Mike Bossy started throwing around their weight against Europeans because they realized no one was going to punch them in the face for doing so. Suddenly, they were acting more like Clark Gillies than Lady Byng.

      "(By the way, I recognize that there is a red herring out there regarding the Flyer telling the Capital to defend himself and the Capital not be willing to fight. This is a distraction, and it is irrelevant. What is relevant is an uninvolved player skating 180 feet to instigate a fight with someone else who was totally uninvolved in anything taking place on the ice. Do that in the real world and you go to jail. Do that in a hockey game and you’re a hero to the hometown fans and especially to the hometown broadcasters.)

      "I also recognize that the NHL, under your leadership, actively and vigorously promotes the most violent aspects of the game. Get out of the owner’s fancy box and spend some time in spectator seats at the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia after the teams have completed their warm-ups but before they return to the ice to start the game and you’ll get a real sense of how the Flyers prepare their fans for the game to come: a never-ending video montage of the game’s most violent hits, always delivered by the home team, accompanied by pounding, violent music. It’s like the Roman Colosseum, with the fans being prepared to demand blood. I’ve learned to stay out of the bowl until the referee is about to drop the puck to avoid this nonsense.

      "At about this point you’re probably contemplating forwarding my letter to the Flyers organization to inquire whether you need to care about me at all, and the truth is, you’ll learn that I’m not a season ticket-holder and therefore maybe not someone you need to be worried about.

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    4. "But I am. You can work in your outrageously priced New York City office, wear $900 suits, and interact mostly with millionaire and billionaire owners, but you probably don’t understand that most season ticket-holders don’t attend every game. Some can’t afford to, and they count on being able to sell some of their tickets to other people; if they couldn’t, they’d have to surrender their season tickets. Others simply lack the time and energy to attend every game, and they, too, count on other people to buy some of their tickets from them. I’m one of the people those people count on, and there are undoubtedly thousands more like me in Philadelphia and in NHL cities across North America.

      Currently, I’m helping to make it possible for three such people to continue holding season tickets, buying nine to ten pairs of tickets a year from them. So no, I’m not a Flyers season ticket-holder, but yes, you need to be concerned about me because people like me make it possible for a lot of those season ticket-holders to continue buying their tickets year after year after year.

      "But now, I’m done. Finished. The events of November 1 convinced me that you, the owners, and the players support the kind of behavior we all saw that day, and I’m not going to watch it anymore.

      "Unfortunately, I’ve already paid my friends for my tickets for this season, so I had no choice but to send them to a reseller and hope for the best; also unfortunately for me, the Flyers aren’t doing very well this year, so I’m probably going to take quite a loss. I also have informed the people who count on me to buy some of their tickets that I won’t be buying them anymore. I won’t be reading about the team and won’t be buying sponsors’ products because if I want to see that kind of mayhem, I can go see professional wrestling or mixed-martial arts. There was always a line, I knew, and that line was crossed on November 1.

      "You had a chance to do something about it and you failed – failed completely and utterly. The Flyer deserves a suspension – ten, twenty games, maybe more; personally, I think he should be permanently banned from the game for his actions, but I saw room for compromise. You didn’t even see room for any kind of disciplinary action at all, falling back, in your impotence, on a literal reading of the rule book instead of what you saw with your own two eyes, so I will take my ticket money, my interest, and my enthusiasm for hockey elsewhere, because through your inaction, and that of the NHL, you’ve lost it forever.

      "I don’t want to be a fan of a sport that, through the manner in which it enforces its rules and governs the behavior of its players, not only condones but also, through its silence, encourages actions like those I witnessed on November 1 – and I won’t be, not anymore."

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    5. Good re-post Steve and amen!

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    6. Chester8:07 AM

      Wow. He speaks for a lot of people. Ray was always an asshole. He should be a beaner. When will those dorks in the NHL offices wake the fuck up. Murica.
      Go Habs

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  29. the Maritimer12:27 PM

    Great read Steve, thanks very much for re-posting that. I agree with the above ex-fan, the game has always had it's brutal moments, but in the Bettman era it seems the chaos has escalated. I don't care if two pissed off opponents want to square off and fight, that stuff still happens occasionally in any sport. Emery did commit assault and the police or a DA in Philly should have recognized that and acted accordingly. Patrick Roy's son did the exact same thing a few years ago in the Q and he was charged with assault, but managed to get off with community service or some such. I guess though we have to recognize where this happened....where the fans go to the airport and boo safe landings. And Santa.

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  30. Good read.
    http://www.habseyesontheprize.com/2009/11/11/1125754/examining-a-wartime-habs-myth-on

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    1. Anonymous7:40 AM

      Good reading -thanks for finding that. Also, speaking of war and with Remembrance Day just past, does anyone know how the words "To you from failing hands we pass the torch; be yours to hold it high" came to be in the Montreal Canadiens dressing room? Who was responsible for it? When did they first appear?

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  31. I am going to an undisclosed location

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  32. I think the water should be doped with a few chill pills in this city.

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  33. the Maritimer7:27 AM

    What a bad break for Steven Stamkos, I don't wish that on anybody. Well, maybe Chara. No, not even him.

    Interesting article on Desharnais in the G&M today, poor Breezer, the fans were merciless on him. I don't think it will come to that with DD, he's not in as vulnerable a position as a defenceman or a goalie. I remember my oldest son's atom team, they had two players the coach had to "hide" on lines with strong players. MT2.0 may have to do that with Davey for a while. Maybe for a couple of years.

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