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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Ducks vs. Senators – Game 5

Well, here we go. The Cup is in the building tonight, we’re seriously regretting having just eaten dinner, and NBC is attempting to defuse our tension by setting their highlight into to “Pirates Of The Caribbean” music. Oh come on, NBC — surely you can do better than that!

ACK! What is Doc wearing? He’s dressed like Captain Kangaroo tonight. ACK! What is Hullie wearing? What is this retro, skinny-tie look? IPB is split on his suit — Pookie likes how “over-the-top” the material is, Schnookie doesn’t — but the tie comes up a unanimous loser. Okay, NBC earns major kudos from us for replaying Hullie’s “The Ducks suck” commentary from the WCF, and Hull is forced to eat some crow on the air. (Although he does say he did the Ducks a favor and that they’ve played well ever since he made those comments. Actually, Hullie, the reason everyone was laughing at you about that was because they were playing well before you made those comments.)

The absolute pinnacle of unintentional comedy is reached as Pierre McGuire goes all Oprah on us in his interview with Alfredsson about the infamous “shooting at Nieder” incident. Alfie’s excuses fall on deaf ears with Hullie and Ray, who are merciless in their criticism of him.

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Reflections On Nieder: An SCF Off-Day

Nieder drove us nuts;
Season after season his
head was in the clouds.

The Termi-Neider
saved our bacon many times.
Still, we need Xanax.

Cross-check to the head
And jumping Bryan Berard.
Ah! Neider’s psycho.

The beard is now gray –
He left us to play with Rob –
But he’s still the best.

Powerful skating
Effortless gaing the zone
Stealing the puck — yoink!

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Ducks @ Senators – Game 4

Before we launch into the diary for tonight’s game, it should be pointed out that Pookie scored what Schnookie thinks was the best line of this series almost immediately after the end of Game 3. We flipped over to nhl.com, where we spotted the headline, “Pronger Has Forgettable Game” and Pookie snorted, “Forgettable for who? McAmmond?” It is an honor and a thrill to get to work with such a genius.

NBC leads into the broadcast with, not surprisingly, a discussion of the Pronger suspension. The film skips just as we see a slo-mo replay of McAmmond falling to the ice, and Bill Clement’s voice echoes frighteningly. We can only assume they’re trying to give us a sense of what McAmmond was hearing immediately after that hit. The conversation naturally turns towards Brian Burke’s justified complaint that Chris Neil should have been suspended as well for his flying elbow/crosscheck/charge on McDonald, and NBC gives Neil a chance to try to clear his, uh, “good name” in a little interview. Pierre Maguire asks Neil, that big bitch (TM Margee), why he called Pronger is “a backstabber” (among other things) and we chorus what should have been his answer: “Because I’m a fucktard.”

What is going on with Brett Hull? How can it be that he keeps making coherent points? His conclusion when asked whether Pronger and/or Neil should have been suspended is that he thought neither hit was that venal (we disagree), but that based on Pronger getting a game, Neil should have too. Color us shocked, but kudos to Hull.

Well, as if we didn’t hate them enough already, Doc further builds on our loathing of the Senators by saying Neil, that big bitch, is “the face of this franchise” after his performance in Game 3.

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IPB Can’t Handle the Truth!

Well, now that the Ducks have officially “made a series” of this Stanley Cup Final, or whatever, and now that the League has weighed in on the Pronger hit, and now that we’re sitting down with some daiquiris after some hard, rain-soaked hours laboring as gentlewoman farmers, it’s time for IPB to start grappling with some ugly truths.

Ugly Truth #1:
The Ducks are no better than they ought to be. Or whatever it was crotchety old men used to say about “loose women” in ’50s TV shows. Thanks to how badly we wanted to see the Senators get shellacked, we were willing to blind ourselves to the fact that the Ducks are really no better. In a season that was all about the new NHL, with its charm, and its spunk, and its “isn’t this so much better than things used to be?” attitude, the Ducks were out on the Left Coast gooning things up and generally being a group of thuggish asswipes. But we could all ignore them because their games start at the ungodly hour of 10:30 PM Eastern, and, frankly, it’s just easier to try to pretend Brian Burke isn’t really still involved with the NHL. But the evil architect of the infamous Bertuzzi Incident also managed to stumble onto possession of a team that is wicked good at hockey, despite all his efforts to make them otherwise, and here they are, the nearest thing resembling the forces of Good against the soulless, rapacious, holier-than-thou Senators. Unlike last season’s Final, where there the real winner, whatever the outcome, was the fans, this year’s SCF is a lose-lose, and last night’s game just reminded us of that.

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Ducks @ Senators – Game 3

Okay, be forewarned: if the Senators win this game, this is going to be one hell of a cranky game diary. Yes, Gentle Reader, it’s been that kind of day at stately IPB Manor (read: the fridge is still not working, so we knocked ourselves out with a round of cable cars this afternoon).

We hoped for a pre-game show tonight, but who are we kidding? We instead got Billy Graham. Really, NBC?

Oh, yay! Bill Clement excitedly tells us there was “no way [he] would leave [his] buddies Brett Hull and Ray Ferraro at 30 Rock.” Come on, Bill, at least tell us you tried.

We go into commercial with the promise of a Prongsie/Pierre Maguire interview on the flip side. You know what we love about Pierre Maguire (yes, there is actually something we love about him…)? We love that, while writing game diaries of games on VS can be a lot of work, when he’s doing the NBC games these things write themselves.

Holy crap — NBC actually believes this theory that Americans can’t enjoy a sporting event if they can’t locate the city it’s being played in on a map and gives us, honest to God, a brief glimpse of a map of Canada. Seriously, NBC, no one in the States could tell you where Green Bay is, but no one has a problem watching games from Lambeau.

The promised Pronger/Maguire chat finally arrives, and we both kind of expect Pierre to be wearing one of Chris Simpson’s outfits. We are vastly grateful that he is not.

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Ducks vs. Senators – Game 2

Because of the TiVo delay tonight we’re zipping at high speed through the pregame, vowing to stop only for Preissing and Getzlaf interviews. So we opt out of watching Chris Simpson’s report on the motivational dressing room signs and t-shirts the Ducks are deploying.

Doc’s intro to the game proper includes the question, “What bearded warrior will make the difference?” We guess that means it won’t be Getzi, then.

In discussion of the Senators’ performance in Game 1, Eddie earns his paycheck with the hard-hitting analysis that Volchenkov and Fisher were the best two players on the team.

With a vista shot of the pre-game lightshow in the Honda Center, we get a chance to admire our favorite recent development to the pregame pomp and pyrotechnics: the giant pictures projected on the ice. That looks cool.

At the end of the introductory chit-chat, Eddie concludes that this is pretty much a must-win for the Senators (Oh, really?), which means it should be another great game. Well, he predicted that before Game 1, so we can only hope he’s right and we get another match of that caliber.

FIRST PERIOD

Oh! An on-ice interview with Getzi! Yay… oh no. Stop it. Please, cameraman, back off. Hurry! OH IT’S TERRIBLE! THOSE TEETH! Yowza. Getzi’s teeth should never be shown in that kind of lingering, HD closeup.

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