CrashingTheGoalie

By Bill Heintz

We spent the summer marveling at our depth. But we just thought it was like a trophy for winning a dance contest…great to have on the shelf, but hardly necessary when we have all those other medals (2^nd place in the Beauty Contest…a participant ribbon from grade five Sports Day).

Turns out we are running through our depth chart faster than salmonella through a street taco stand.

Funny how this game works sometimes.

I’d been thinking all summer that this would be Grabner’s big chance and then at his training camp he looked tighter than a Swiss Banker’s bum hole. What a shame that just after forcing open a spot on the big team, he’s out for a month and a half.

And was I the only one wondering whether Cody Hodgson really was Calder material? I mean, we all had him centering the second line, but how many of us really thought he might compete for the Calder? And now we are hoping that it was just the back injury, because damn he looked slow and confused.

Usually have to get to my age before that becomes a factor.

But the volume of injuries this season is just one more reason to have an overly developed sense of superstition. How else to explain the abundance of broken bones, sprained ligaments and cracked ribs? We must have done something to piss off one of the hockey gods.

Curiously, at the start of the season when we iced a first string line up, we played like we were on Ambien. And then, while we were scratching our scalps about why we were being smacked around like prison yard bitches, the injuries started to pile up. Hansen right away…and then Daniel Sedin in the first game we looked good in and well, you know the list.

So what about tonight?

The Rangers have elite goaltending and they can win any given game one to nothing. And the truth is, we don’t know who we’re getting tonight…the team that shut out division leading Colorado, or the team that was eviscerated by cellar dwelling Anaheim. That’s the problem with depth players…it’s one of the reasons they are depth players.

The consistency just isn’t there yet.