travel_dude

Need to begin Stage 1

Jarnkrok out due to sickness

Still no mention of Monahan. Oh, Scott Oake can talk about the scrum at practice.

Is SN even aware that Monahan is injured? No mention of it in the pre-Leafs...I mean pre-game. More important to talk about a EN 50th goal or a fight in ANA or what coaches don't have extensions signed. Or a Zegras special skills goal. Or Marty SL returning to Tampa. Or. Or.

It's not just cap. Ruzie was a roster decision, not cap. 23 max players. Maybe we don't bring in Carpenter, but we would be down a C, waiving Richardson. REgardless of being claimed or not, he was down due to roster limits.

The Chairot part got axed because they wanted Pelletier. Really a non-starter for a pending UFA. Had to keep it separate, and who know how expensive it would have been. By the sounds of it, we walked away. Lindholm ended up being retained salary. Cost a lot of picks, but whatever. Only of interest if we could re-sign him. Yes, it would have been good to re-sign him, but would cost us Hanifin later. "Not that there is anything wrong with that". Had Monahan been diagnozed in March and placed on LTIR (big if), it may have reduced some of the asking proces on players, but I think teams selling don't care about that. They want the extras to retain salary. May have missed out on Copp, but he's getting paid next year. Other than him, were there any C's that would make a difference? Giroux was never an option.

One of the things that Gaudreau talked about last year was that Monahan had real trouble taking draws, that he was lame for about a minute after it. If he had a long term injury, then he would have poor faceoff stats up to the LA game. In recent weeks, his only sub 50% games were SJS and NJ. Really though, it's anyone's guess when it happened. One day he is good, the next he can't go.

As usual RD, thanks for putting up the GDT. Your's are much nicer to look at than mine. I usually just do a rush job. Given the practice lines Friday, I would think we get Carpenter in the middle and Stone on RD with Tanev. Hard to say what goalie gets the start tonight. STL got burned for the 2nd point last night, so they want a win. Binnington started last night, but got the hook after 14 minutes and 13 shots. Mostly giveaways, so I can't be certain he was at fault for any more than 1 goal. The shorty was the worst, but it was a breakaway. We were supposed to get Husso tonight, but they might go back to Bing. They need him to get his game back. Not a great game for them to do that, but then again, there really aren't many now.

According to Sutter, this just happened. Maybe not against LA, but most likely against SJS. There was a big drop off in that game. The line got burned for 2 goals at evens. They only played 9 minutes, and there was a ton of hits. Was not a long standing injury.

The timing sucks. Unfortunately, the role he was given was to be a banger. There may be some truth to when the drop off happened, but I don't know that I saw much different from him playing 3rd line or 4th line. His PP time reduced it seems once we got Toffee. There really hasn't been any time when I thought he was any better. SOme games you saw hints of it. I almost think this is an event, not a wearing down. There is a tendency to overuse one side when the other is recovering, but in theory he was 100%, not 100 on one side and 60 on the other. He's taken a lot of hits recently, so it may have been a minor injury around the time he sat out and a big one in the LA game. Or just a big impact in the LA or COL game. The COL game featured a ton of hits by them (25), but the LA game was only 9 counted. Really the only two recent games for him. He last played against VAN and SJS.

He's a defensive C that has played 300 NHL games. His faceoff win are 52% in CHI. Not a lot of scoring, but he's bigger than Dube and can play on the PK. Ruzie is the next callup likely, but there wan't time to do it, and he was sick last week. Ruzie is also better than a 4C, so would need to alter the roster to make him more usefull. Coleman was not ever billed as a power forward as much as a guy that brings a high compete level and knows what's needed to win games. He's too small to be a power forward. But he battles every shift so you think he's bigger. I would like to see him score more, but that's not his role so much this year. AT least not until the playoffs.

According to BT, he wasn't complaining about it prior to Friday. Probably was the usualy story about playing through something. Said that when Sean complains something isn't right, then it's past the normal play through it scene. Most likely, it was a hit in the LA game that made it that much worse. Obviously, there is a good chance that this was a nagging thing, possibly genetic, but the indication is it was an event that created the problem Thursday. It's the labrum. Those can be tears or impact related. Either way it sucks. The only upside to this is we will get a decent C into the lineup at some point. Ruzie is good enough to play 3rd line C. If that means that Carpenter sits and we use Jarnkrok to solidify the 4th line, so be it. I would rather balance it out with a skill guy playing the 3rd line and the better defensive guy helping out the 4th line. Jarnkrok isn't exactly known for scoring a lot of goals. Ruzie has a better p/gp average. EDIT - as a Flame that is. Jarnkrok is closer to 0.5 p/gp in Seattle.

They needed to bring up Mackey to fill in for Kylington. Will go from there. Ruzie the likely call up, but they have 2 guys that were sitting. Carpenter and Ritchie. BT said they will see how it goes tonight. They go to California, so they can bring in Ruzie when they get there. No time to do it for tonight. At least if they wait till they go to Cali, Ruzie doesn't need to fly here for no reason. Won't practice at home before they go.

Yeah, I posted a bit about it on the Biatches thread and the Lineup one.

Not sure how they adjust for the loss of Monahan and Shilly. Could bring in Ritchie against STL. Use STone as he's the next man up. Or they use the RHS C they got at TDL and play the better of the two defense. I'm guessing, but... Top line Mange-Backlund-Toffee Coleman-Jarnkrok-Dube Lucic-Carpenter-Lewis Top pair Mackey-Tanev Zaddy-Guddy I think it's better to go with a puck moving LHS to pair up with Tanev than a RHS. Stone is a heavy player and could be an option against LA or SJS, but I go with the puck mover. Carpenter gives you more options on the PK than Ritchie. Puts a better winger on RW. I suppose you could use Carpebnter on RW also, but either way, probably better than Ritchie.

Posted this elsewhere. Monahan out for the season. Needs surgery on his other hip. Done until training camp. Shilly day to day. Mackey recalled, though we need a better C than Carpenter. Can't really do anything about it right now until Shilly is back.

Monahan out for the season. Needs surgery on his other hip. Done until training camp. Shilly day to day. Mackey recalled, though we need a better C than Carpenter. Can't really do anything about it right now until Shilly is back.

Monahan placed on IR. Yikes

I was wrong. Monahan placed on IR

BT doing a Saturday morning presser. Only two things I can think of. 1) Gaudreau re-signing 2) Kylington injury update, though he doesn't normally do this type of thing. Hoping for the 1st.

Yeah, I'm not even sure what team I have watched the last two games. Really, it's been longer than 2 games. The EDM was a shootout, so hard to read anything into that. The Buff loss, the COL loss, the SJS loss. Not our best. I like that Sutter is bearing down on the players because they might be losing focus. Taking the foot off the gas to save some intensity for the playoffs. Well, keep that up and we won't be doing anything. Get in the minset that each game is a playoff game and a loss sets you back in the series. 2 x 7 game series coming up. Win a minimum of 4 from each set. Lose one? Better not lose the next game.

It's less a question about them winning a WC spot as pushing out a team like EDM or LA. LA - 84 points - 28 RW - 70 games played EDM - 83 points - 31 RW - 69 games played VGK - 80 points - 31 RW - 70 games played The three teams have bascially all caught up the games in hand. 3-4 points in nothing to take for granted either way. EDM plays 7 games on the road, including the Cali trip, Minny, Nash and Pitts. Th home games include COL, Dallas, and Vegas. One B2B to finish the year. Vegas plays VAN 3x, ARI, NJ, CHI and SJ. A couple of tougher games against CGY, Dallas, WAS and STL. And a 4 pointer against EDM. LA plays CGY, EDM, Minny, CHI, COL, then finishes with non-playoff teams CBJ, ANA x2, CHI, Seattle and VAN. Good on EDM for getting two wins, but they were anything but playoffs hockey. High event, higher than average scorng, oppinents in a B2B situation, 3v3 OT and SO. They hold a top 3 due to winning 9 in a row at home. Away record not so great. Last 6 games on the road they have only have poinst in two games, both OTL. You listen to the comments and the fans believe they are playoff bound. No question. I'm not so sure. The next 7 games in two weeks will decide their fate. 6 on the road. One at home to the AVS. Two of the road games are 4 pointers in the Pacific. It's no cake walk regardless of who we get. It's likely to be a Central team. A 2nd round matchup would be the winner of the other Pacific matchup. I don't know if it's possible to get a Central team, but I will illustrate below what might happen. If we had the matchup based on projected standings (points %): R1 COL vs Dallas (DAL wins) CGY vs NAS (CGY wins) Minny vs STL (MIN wins) EDM vs LA (EDM wins) R2 CGY vs DAL EDM vs MIN

The other one I saw was "Ken Holland hires Dave Tippett.". Too easy to see through that, and got even more dumb when it went on to say that Paul Coffey. I see they played STL last night, and were due to get less than adequate Binnington, which meant we would get Husso. Wonderful. As it turned out, Binnington didn't even finish the first period, giving up 4 goals on 13 shots. Husso gave up one after they had got it to 4-3. STL battled back and tied it up, almost ending the night before OT.

Gaudreau named 2nd star for the month of March. This comes after being named 2nd star of the week. Individual honors aside, I want his next trophy to be Conn Smythe. I don't so much care for the Hart, as that is regular season.

The Backlund play was after a change of the entire line. Any other time it's a good plan. I think the next play was a FO loss, so that didn't pan out, but the point was the Kings were tired. No way they get a change until the goalie froze it. Keep at them and they take a penalty or we get a goal. I'm a little bit frustrated with the setup in the O-zone as well, especially on the PP. We have a set play that gets used a lot and it involves Tkachuk behind the net. We will avoid cross crease passes to goto it. When Lindy is on, it works, but a lot of times it's a pass into coverage with little chance of success. One of the things that teams like COL do is the D start to creep in on each pass. They collapse the coverage until they have better seams. But anyway, I am just saying we do things that are easier to defend, once the team knows the tendency. They know we tend not to shoot from the D, so they clog the middle and box us out. We go around the horn too much at times and spend half the time recovering and setting up the next pass. PP2 doesn't seem to get much time in the O-zone, so they need to look at personnel or strategy, cuz it ain't working. Thought we were more dangerous with Kylington on the boards. Maybe we need Monahan in the slot, since he can at least battle for real estate.