On the night of the 2009 Blizzard, some very mixed hockey was played. Interestingly it was not only snowing outside, it was somehow snowing inside the building too. Snow flurries were falling on both rinks, which added a nice magical quality to things.
The first game of the night was the Wizards versus top team Thundercats. There’s a reason they are the top team and we had a hard time trying to contain them. I think the final score was 7-0 or 8-0. I’d say the puck was in our offensive zone about 75% of the game. We had issues of just trying to toss the puck, and putting it right back on their sticks or throwing it far away, allowing their defense to turn it around quickly.
There’s a reason this team is on top, they’ve got a couple key players who carry the team very well and they’ve also many solid mid-level players who know exactly how to work with the key ones. This renders there few low level players pretty harmless on the ice. It was nice to hear some of the Thundercats get irritated with one of their key players who wasn’t passing the puck and trying to do everything himself. It’s no fun to play on a team that has that sort of selfish player.
The Tigers played next and even though about half the team was a no-show due to weather, we still put up a solid 8-5 win against the Hotshots who had similar personnel issues. The Hotshots picked up two Wizards who weren’t on their roster while we picked up one Wizard not on ours. I loved that we had only one non-rostered player and that all our goals came from regular Tigers players: Adam with four (yay Adam! his first hat trick), Jason with two, Grigory with one and Mike with one (and one that was a spectacular in the top corner shot).
I was pleased with my play in both games last night. The Tigers was certainly the better game. We only had three D, so I was out a lot, but it was solid D too. I stopped a lot of Hotshots either by putting my body in the way or taking the puck over their stick. Yes, there were mistakes, but on the whole it was a good game for me. The Wizards game had a lot more errors, but there were some good choices made too. I’m not sure what I would’ve done differently in the Wizards game so I think I did the best I could in it.
Where I did not play well was at Ronnie’s Ice. The drills were a mess for me, including the penalty kills that I usually do pretty good at. The four-on-four scrimmage was also bad. I wasn’t connecting, I wasn’t making good choices and all-in-all my teammates would’ve probably preferred if I’d been on the other team.
In other news, I didn’t get to play with the Ordinals last night becuase of the early game start time. It’s too bad because they finally beat the Canucks with a score of 7-2. That win has been a long time coming. It was great to hear that story recounted when I got to the rink for my later games.
