A Quiet Tuesday Night With IPB

Here you go, Gentle Reader — our musings during a mellow night of hockey on VS, the only channel that can make a four-point night from Sid Crosby seem boring:

– Is this the year? Is this the year the Devils get the #1 pick overall? (We should point out that we think this is a great ad campaign. It manages to showcase players that aren’t Sid, so all those crankypantses out there who say this never happens can just put a sock in it, and it also presents a really great balance of serious and fun. Good stuff, NHL! Now if only you’d get cracking on our wishes to see more behind the scenes stuff.)

– VS clearly isn’t working hard enough to get us to memorize who all its color guys are. When Doc makes a reference to a player being minor-league teammates with Andy Brickley, Pookie says, “Heh, I almost just found myself asking, ‘Who’s Andy Brickley?’” Boomer responds, “Well, who is Andy Brickley?”

– Sid is interviewed during the intermission. Schnookie decides he sounds like he’s trying to do his best Super-Coop impression. “Well, Chris, I’ve learned a lot since dinner…” We’re also not pleased that Sid has ditched his clearly beloved sweat-stained perfectly-broken-in baseball hat for some heeee-diously ugly form-fitting trucker hat. Sid, we don’t care if Maxie and CheeseTed said it was cool. It isn’t.

– It sounds like VS is experimenting with shaking maracas next to their ambient microphones tonight.

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Rangers @ Penguins 10/23/2007

In the warm afterglow of “Sidney Crosby: Revealed” (diary to follow), we slide straight into the Rangers at the Pens, complete with some wildly unprecedented editorializing by VS – their sexy studio-portrait player shots in the intro include some graphics floating along behind Chris Drury, and those graphics, Gentle Reader, are — hilariously — giant, green, cartoony dollar signs. It takes us several minutes to recover.

We get to start with Chris Simpson interviewing Sid; she is actually wearing a bazonga-covering shirt tonight, but Sid is still adamantly staring anywhere but at her chest. He is also demonstrating what a Little Wooden Robot Whore he is – he’s got a VS towel draped over his shoulders. Oh, Sid. (Boomer is convinced Chris is only wearing a shirt because Sid refused to be interviewed if she was going to wear her usual cleavage-bearing tops. She is also convinced when we see Chris later tonight on the Rangers bench, she’ll be wearing only a bra.)

FIRST PERIOD

19:47 We’re going to tell ourselves now that this is a win-win for us – if the Pens win, then the Rangers lose, obviously, and that’s the happiest thing hockey has to offer. But if the Rangers win, then we’ll remind ourselves the Penguins are in our division.

18:05 We are looking for hilariousness tonight, and so far this game has not offered that. A Gronk sighting on the Pens first foray into the Rangers’ zone prompts Pookie to declare, “Gronk is going to get no more than ten points this year.”

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Sharks @ Flames, 10/22/07

It is never easy for us to remain alert after dinner on Monday nights, and it’s exponentially harder to do so the day we came back from vacation. But Gentle Reader, we will endeavor, for you, to stay awake tonight while soaking up all the kick-assedness the Sharks and Flames have to offer, despite the fact that we know exactly nothing about either one of these teams.

We’re getting the Flames feed on Center Ice, and the broadcasters are color-guy Charlie Simmons and the hilariously-named play-by-play man Roger Millions. He sounds like he could be Max Power’s cousin.

Ugh. The pre-game features a tribute to Owen Nolan for his 1,000th game; there are few players we can think of who are less inspiring than Owen Nolan, and this highlight reel is pretty funny for how many teams he’s played for. The big present here for Owen is a “custom-made” bottle of wine, presented to him by Mike Ricci – oh my god! We just want to know what products he uses! Oh, wait, sorry. The big present for Owen is a goofy ATV thing. The fans appear to be as underwhelmed as we are; are we the only people here who don’t think 1,000 games played is as remarkable a milestone as it once was?

FIRST PERIOD

19:26 Mr. Millions mentions that Jeremy Roenick is on the ice right now, and we are suddenly convinced we’re going to see him score his 500th goal, because what could be more fun than watching JR get to 500 on the night Owen Nolan played his 1,000th game?

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Caps @ Rangers 10/12/07

Fasten your seatbelts, Gentle Reader – it’s our very first Rangers game diary of the season. So let’s go Caps. Bring the pain! Kick off our weekend with an awesome smackdown of our most hated team!

FIRST PERIOD

19:50 Ovie kicks things off by taking a penalty; based on the replay MSG shows us (accompanied by Micheletti’s helpful color commentary, “It’s Ovechkin… he comes in… it’s Ovechkin… um…”) the infraction was the always-egregious “playing the puck”. Nice job, guys in the truck.

18:20 Big slow goalies have big slow fiveholes; Gomer is left alone at the side of the net and sweeps the puck through Kolzig to give the Rangers a 1-0 lead. The intro to this game had some “the sky is falling!” action about how Jagr, Shanny and Gomer are all goalless in their first three games, and featured a graphic detailing the last time those guys had that happen. For Jagr it was in, like, ’94, Shanny, like, ’73 and Gomez? Well, he’s never scored a goal in his first three games. Do the Rangers have some slightly misguided expectations of their big free-agent pick-up?

18:10 MSG gives us a replay of what the Ovechkin penalty actually was – he slew-footed a Ranger on the opening faceoff. That’s a dumb-assed penalty, but Micheletti squawks, “That’s a slew-foot! He’s lucky he only got two!” Joe, it’s not that dumb a penalty.

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IPB Around The Dial

Friday nights are a no-diarizing zone for us, so instead of a blow-by-blow account of all our thoughts and hopes and dreams during the games we’re watching on TiVo delay, we’ll share with you instead a glancing overview of the things that flitted through our brains on a night of hockey.

We kicked things off tonight with the shocking discovery that our cable set-up is still screwy. It took us a good two months this summer of haggling with Comcast to get it up and running, and as we went to set up our recording of the Caps-Thrashers game ahead of time, we learned that we’re not getting the Center Ice channels on our TiVo guide. So Pookie spent 45 minutes on the phone with our good friends at Comcast, affording Schnookie the opportunity to witness this brilliant, one-sided exchange: “I know that is not the correct explanation for why this isn’t working. I know you just made that answer up. [Pause] Are you just going to sit there in silence until I hang up? No. I don’t believe you. You’re making that up, and I want a better explanation. You’re doing it again! You’re just sitting there in silence until I hang up. [Pause. Then speaking to Schnookie] Oh. I’m on hold. Heh.”

We kicked things off with the Pens-Hurricanes game (Canes win, 4-1), and our thoughts on that were as follows:

– By far our favorite reveal of the Pens game came on a random, first-period shot of Maxie Talbot, who sloooowly turned to the camera to reveal… A Randito Bandito! Sweet!

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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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Pseudo-Opening Day: Ducks vs. Kings 09/29/07

Can you believe it, Gentle Reader? It’s hockey! For reals! It might be from England, but according to the schedule, it counts. It’s impossibly bright and sunny here, and this noon start time feels like we should be watching football, but who are we to complain? IT’S HOCKEY!

Unlike many with fancy TVs, we’re not watching today on HDNet, since the tree in our backyard is blocking our satellite HD feeds, and Comcast doesn’t want to carry it on our cable. Instead, we’re rocking the Center Ice, with the Kings feed; we love these two guys. Bob Miller does a pretty decent play-by-play, and Jim Fox is like the most chipper guy in the universe. We love his cadence when the Kings do something crappy – they could take a catastrophically stupid penalty and he’ll chirp, “And that was a stupid play by [that guy], so now the Kings are going to be down a man!” like it’s something to be really happy about. We heartily approve of Jim Fox.

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