(Please join us, Gentle Reader, as we wander our way around the dial here on Day 2 of the playoffs, a night with no Devils, and not a lot of interest for us until the late games. We’ll update this post as we go.)
We settled down in front of the TV a bit late this evening, about midway through the early games; since we’re equally ambivalent about these matchups, we opted to minimize our Versus exposure for as long as possible and turned on the Habs/Bruins game on CBC.
– We realize Montreal fans are building a bit of a reputation as singers, but we must admit that we frown on any fan-base belting out “Hey Hey, Na Na, Goodbye” during any non-elimination game. It’s like the obnoxious fan version of saying a Game 2 is “must-win”. It also smacks of hubris. Don’t Montreal fans know that the Hockey Gods frown on hubris?
– Kelly Hrudey’s giant telestrator television makes us wonder if John Oliver or Jason Jones is going to pop up and start making fun of it. It’s so very Indecision 2008. But with more Kelly Hrudey. And therefore, that much cooler. Or something.
– Between games, we flip channels to spare ourselves more Versus. And we settle on “Ziegfeld Girl” on TCM. Ack! Cognitive dissonance!
– Finally, it’s 10:00! We flip to Ducks/Stars in HD on Blersus, just in time to catch an interview with Chris Pronger in which he chortles that no, he doesn’t think about playing the game in a less suspendably dirty way because “it’s too fast to think out there.” Greeeeeat.
– We wrote a few days ago about playoff hockey commercials, and commented that we hadn’t yet been faced with that one commercial that drives us batty every single time we see it. That commercial has turned out to be the hockey fan banging on the glass of the nursery. The roles here at stately IPB Manor are clearly laid out: Pookie mans the television zapper and Schnookie and Boomer alert her when this commercial comes on by doing all they can in the face of this obnoxious ad, and by that we mean making unintelligible noises with increasing volume and decreasing control until Pookie hits the mute button. Six more weeks of “Hey Baby!” Six more weeks.
– We are pleasantly surprised to hear Neil Smith is calling this game.
– Totally fired up to be flipping channels between two games we’re really interested in, we dart over to the Sharks/Flames game during the first Ducks/Stars commercial… just in time for baseball highlights. We feel out-of-practice at this.
– Last year we ridiculed the Ducks for those ridiculous t-shirts and locker room signs that said “Heart”, “Sacrifice”, and… we can’t remember the other 3. “Illegal Hits”? “Oops, My Shirt Fell Off”? “Don’t Worry — It’s Just the Senators”? At any rate, it seems we can start the ridicule this year for their F.O.C.U.S. acronym. We’ve yet to learn what it stands for, but we thumb our noses at teams that need gimmickry (16W, anyone?) to motivate the team. Hm. Now that we think about it, 16W worked in 2001, as did “Heart, Sacrifice, My Shirt Fell Off” in 2007. Maybe the Devils need to stoop to this, too. Rock The Red isn’t enough. The boys need something that says, “The fact that it’s the Playoffs isn’t enough — I need a slogan to get me sufficiently revved up.” Maybe Mike Rupp can start taking suggestions from his teammates on that.
– Just as Schnookie snarks of a listless Dallas man-advantage, “This power play is looking potent” the Stars fire the puck past Jiggy. Pookie: “Jiggy’s like, ‘It’s potent enough, thank you!’” We’re firmly on the Stars side of this one. They are, after all, the Devils of the West.
– During the Sharks intermission, we see an interview with Ron Wilson in which he says that if the Sharks win the Cup, he “guarantees” that Patrick Marleau will win the Conn Smythe. We wonder if that’s his backhanded way of saying, “If we don’t win the Cup, it’s all Marleau’s fault.”
– Some discussion ensues amongst the IPB Irregulars about how all the games tonight have been almost perfectly timed to go to commercial at the same time, making the time-worn joy of flipping back and forth between games nearly impossible. We’re reminded that in his masterful March Madness Diaries last year, Bill Simmons gave this ugsome phenomenon a name — “An Urkin” (after a despicable character in “Borat”). It’s so much easier to complain about the synced commercials when you’ve got an evocative title for them.
– The Sharks feed has recently been taken over by Comcast (replacing FSN), and it really looks awful. Sure, it’s suffering by comparison with the HD Versus feed of the Stars game, but it’s also got this heavy, dark blue and red bar across the top of the screen with the score and clock. It takes us a while, though, to figure out that the bar is what’s bothering us about the picture:
Pookie: “Comcast’s feed looks like it’s coming from the ’80′s.”
Schnookie: “It’s that heavy bar at the top.”
Pookie: “It makes me feel like the ceiling is collapsing in on me. Like I’m in a…” She trails off
Schnookie: “In a trash compactor? In the Death Star?” (Yes, we know — it’s the walls moving in, but you get the idea.)
Pookie: “Yes. That’s exactly what I mean. But I was going to say ‘tractor beam.’”
– It should be mentioned that the anthropomorphic puck with the teal beard promoting Comcast’s fan playoff beard promotion is horrifying. Can’t sleep. Bearded puck with feminine legs will eat me.
– What a thoroughly entertaining evening of hockey! Have we ever mentioned that we love the playoffs?
