Sing A Song Of Season Predictions (Part 1)

It’s time to do some season previewing, and this year IPB’s going at it all Bucci-style. That’s right, Gentle Reader — Just like Bucci does, we wrote down 30 song lyrics we thought were awesome and cool, then randomly assigned them to teams in the hopes that they would add a depth of meaning and emotional resonance to our predictions. Yeah, you heard us: we literally drew song lyrics out of a hat to assign to each team, exactly the way we assume Bucci does. We would be remiss not to mention that we are hockey savants, super-geniuses who correctly predicted who would win the Cup last year, so you can definitely take everything we say here to the bank. Today we’re starting with the Western Conference, listed from worst to first (click here for our Eastern Conference preview).

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Kings vs. Ducks 09/30/07

Well, Gentle Reader, it’s another beautiful day here for all manner of outdoorsy, autumnal activities, but only a crazy person would opt to do those things instead of watching hockey! So we’re settling back, keeping our fingers crossed that the tech crew at O2 arena has learned how to turn on the lights, and hoping against hope that the Ducks don’t remember how to play hockey before the end of today’s game.

Oh, that’s right! Today’s game is on VS! No Brian Hayward for us… we hope. Instead it’s Gary Green and Paul Romanuk, two guys we’ve never consciously heard call a game before. Nice of VS to bring their “A” team to the NHL’s stupid big media-event season opener, instead of just coopting the NHL Network’s feed. That’s just the sort of move a big-time sports broadcaster like ESPN would do.

After Bernier impressed us all yesterday, the Kings are doing what we all would have done if we were in their shoes – starting LaBarbera instead. In the studio show, Larry Murphy seems to think this is a good idea, because the Kings would just be “setting [Bernier] up for failure” if they left him in. Pookie says Cloutier is down in the minors saying, “Vindication! They set me up to fail! It wasn’t my fault!”

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