Canucks @ Ducks – Game 5

The NHL likes to brag, justifiably, about how the Stanley Cup is the hardest championship to win, how their postseason is the most grueling in all of professional sports, and we will never disagree. We’re just sitting on our couch watching and we’re exhausted. So we want to start tonight’s game diary with an expression of our gratitude to the schedule maker who gave us a break today; with no early game we were able to take rejuvenating naps. Tonight we are bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and ready to blog us some great game diary. (As an aside, our favorite anonymous players in the league are the ones who answered that THN player poll earlier this year by saying their favorite part of being in the NHL is the naps. That is just fantastic. Schnookie has long held that if napping was an Olympic sport she’d be an American hero.)

The pregame features an interview on the ice with Teemu; we neglected to mention during our recap of Game 4 that Selanne seems to have been replaced at some point during this series with Lon Cheney. His face is just… just… wow. It hurts so much to think about how swollen, discolored, meaty, exploded it is. Ouch.

FIRST PERIOD

We hate those wrap-around LCD screens in arenas, and we recoil with horror when we discover the Ducks have two wrapping around the arena bowl, and one on their Jumbotron.

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Devils @ Senators – Game 4

We’re starting this game tonight on a 3-hour TiVo delay because Pookie had to work late. The one benefit of not being able to watch it in realtime? The fact that we don’t have to sit through VS’s pregame. If they’d asked us to come up with John Forslund and Eddie Olczyk’s talking points, though, we’d probably have them mention that the Devils have played exactly one period in this entire series in which they weren’t offensively uptight to the point of self-destruction. And that was the second period of Game 1, where they were down by three and had nothing more to lose. We recognize that Ottawa is a very strong defensive team, but in all honesty, they haven’t needed to be. What are the Devils hoping to have happen if they keep skating this way? Because at this rate, they’re not going to score again until next season.

FIRST PERIOD
19:55 Rupper is out, Clarkson is in. So much for the rumors of Oduya getting into the lineup.

19:47 Oh no. Eddie thinks we need Patty to score in order to win. We guess we’re not winning tonight.

18:08 Travis proves that he’s every bit as good as Gomer, in that he decides he’s going to try to beat all the Senators by himself and ends up overhandling into a turnover.

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