NHL 09-10 Season

I noticed there isn't a current season thread so I figured I'd start one. I use to play hockey in my mid teens, I haven't watched NHL games since then, its not easy over here in Australia. I've been following Red Wings pre/opening games in Sweden, haven't had many wins but they aren't playing too badly, hoping they improve.

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I'd like to say the Oilers are gonna win it all, but they won't. I'd like to say the Canucks are gonna lose it all, and they might. That's what happens when you grow up in a city like Edmonton with one of the greatest teams in history winning five cups when you're a kid, your loyalty doesn't move when you do. And the city you now live in is home to a bunch of fans who think their team is the greatest and tend to brag about it, yet they've never won anything.

Really looking forward to Olympic hockey coming early next year here in Vancouver, this is huge for us Canadians and anything less than gold is unacceptable. The Russians though, they are looking good.

Where's Justin by the way? He's a pretty big hockey fan and I haven't seen him around here since before his team won the cup. Dillman too, I haven't seen him here in a while.

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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Any Wings fans here ?

I live in Pittsburgh, so...quite the opposite.

Yes, back when they had Steve Yzerman on their team.

Lol. That will make things interesting..

Same here, I've been following there current squad but I'm not familiar with them.

Always been a fan of the Leafs and even now when Sundin's quit. He's my all time favourite Swedish player. But, I've always liked the Canadian teams a bit more. They're kind of struggling and don't seem to have the same economy behind them as the US teams.

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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

Well, the NHL has a salary cap, so most of the teams have very similar payrolls. The bottom 11 in terms of payroll this year are all U.S. teams, and no Canadian teams are below the league average.

Yes, the salary cap is definitely good for the game.

Does anyone here play or has played hockey ?

I played in the early nineties.

My niece started figure skating, so I decided to break the skates out.
It's been a painful experience.

LA Kings fan.

I played for years growing up, both league and shinny hockey. I grew up in Edmonton and damn it could get cold there, but one good thing about it was playing outdoor hockey in the winter. Some of my best memories as a kid involve grabbing the skates, gloves, stick and puck, walking across the field to the local outdoor rink and joining in whatever game was being played. The lights coming on at night, a dozen people on the ice and nobody keeping score.

I had one of my ribs knocked out of place when I use to play. Injuries are just part of the game.



In Australia hockey is a underdog sport, barely anyone knows anything about it. There are only two ice rinks in the state I live in. Maybe five or six inline rinks but they are all spread out. So it costs a lot just to drive to games or practice. What you described would be a dream over here.

Nice start for the Penguins. Goligoski and McKee are working out nicely....

Indeed. Very glad to see them starting so strong out of the gate, given how sluggish they were last year. It's a long season and I'm a bit of a fair-weather fan, so I'm still not watching most of the games, but they're looking sharp enough that I'm checking the scores a lot more than I normally would be at this time of the year.

I've been shocked and pleasantly surprised by my Kings.

Lackluster effort by the Penguins. I think Orpik is 100% correct when he assessed the situation:

"It seems like some guys are in it one night, and other guys aren't," defenseman Brooks Orpik said. "And the next night, maybe the handful that was, isn't. Role reversal. There's really no excuse for it.

"You see some of the goals or some of the battles, just small puck battles, it seems like, and we're losing them. To me, it's just battle level."

From: http://www.postgazette.com/pg/10089/1046719-100.stm

Penguins have looked awful.

Relatively speaking. I can't get worked up about this stuff, though; if Fleury gets hot and the team players a little better it won't even matter. Hard to get up in arms about seeding, unless it's extreme, too.

Obviously I'd bet "The Field" but we're going to end up with right around the same number of points we had last year, so whatever. We're still in the mix yet again.