Last night was really dreadful. Both the Tigers and Ordinals lost and I felt like I played pretty bad across the board.
The night got started at 4pm with the Tigers taking on the Rockets in a game that the Rockets owned from the beginning and ended with the Tigers loosing 5-0. While I was on the ice for only one of the goals, for the first half of the game I was not playing well. I made some poor defensive choices and had a few instances where my puck handling was equally poor. I’m not sure what was going on there. At least the second half of the game I seemed to have a bit of a brain reboot and played better.
I did have a couple of decent offensive moves, carrying the puck into the zone a couple times and getting either some good shots off or delivering the puck into the front of the net with a centering pass. Unfortunately those efforts, like the other offensive attempts were not successful.
The Ordinals didn’t fare any better against the Knights at 11:30pm. We usually give a pretty competitive game to the Knights, but last night we fell into some old Ordinals habits. The passing game was off, players were bunching up and running into each other and it was difficult for us to maintain any offensive pressure. Luckily we avoided the shutout and ended with a 6-1 score.
Again, I played not so good and, unfortunately, didn’t manage a brain reboot either so it stuck through the whole game. I don’t even know how many of those six goals I was on the ice for (and probably don’t want to think about it either).
One of the things I have to work on, and did manage to find last night, is lifting the puck for passes. Somehow this is a skill I’ve lost over the past few weeks and, even among the mess that was last night, I managed to find it occasionally. I know where the problem is, I just have to consistently get it fixed. I’ll be working on this more at Ronnie’s next week.
Speaking of Ronnie’s, that was the highlight of the hockey day. It was the perfect 4am skate with only 11 people plus two goalies. The drills were good, especially working on the penalty killing. The scrimmage was fun and exhausting since we did 4-on-4. My bench only had one sub, so there was a lot of ice time in that hour. Here I played pretty well, having to do D again Roman, Joe, Brian, Laurie and a couple others. Here I did pretty good… if only that had carried through to the evening.
Hopefully next week will be better… there’s only Ronnie’s and a Tigers game (and maybe a Wizards game if there’s space for me).
