GMRwings1983

He'll never go into the HOF, since he'll never retire. He's the Ric Flair of hockey at this point.

Roberto Luongo was brought in to take Vancouver from perennial 1st and 2nd round exits to the next level as a franchise. So far, they haven't looked any better in the playoffs in his 4 seasons, then they have before with Dan "freaking" Cloutier. They'll most likely lose to Chicago, and have another early playoff exit. He's had too many awful games in these playoffs already and seems to have little confidence in his game. I know hockey is a team sport and the others guys haven't stepped it up either for them, but for all the praise this guy gets, I'm starting to agree with people who have been saying for years that he's overrated and isn't a good playoff goalie. Maybe they'll win the series and he'll make me eat my words, but right now he looks like the most overrated player in the league, with lesser known goalies playing much better in these playoffs.

Hopefully Volchenkov is dying to play with Lebda, and is willing to take a major paycut in order to do so.

Someone will post that infamous picture now of him sitting poolside with the lifeguard.

Sammy should be captain. He was their best player at the most clutch time of the year.

We did have a quality 3rd line in the regular season. They just didn't step up in the playoffs. Do you think we should just gut that 3rd line?

The fact that Hal Gill has survived the "new NHL" style of play.

No we don't and this isn't 2002. We're not going to have Hall of Famers on our 3rd and 4th lines anymore. Actually, our bottom two lines played well this year offensively, but struggled in the playoffs. The 4th line is definitely for grinders and fighters. 3rd line could use a mixture of grit, scoring and checking, but don't expect some great scorers to come here and play on the 3rd line. Just doesn't work that way anymore with the salary cap.

I never dated him to begin with.

Is it possible not to hate Lame-O? ****** doesn't work hard when he's here, and as soon as he leaves, he starts working hard for someone else. He's like those people on the road that drive slow, and when you try to pass them, they speed up. *******.

Montreal has played two 7 game series' and are way undersized against a much more physical and gritty Flyers team. Neither Washington nor Pittsburgh were nearly as physical as Philly is.

Leave it to SWF to start a trolling goalie thread. I personally don't expect Ozzie to return next year. I think he took a lot of s*** from Babcock this year and would probably want to move on. Someone else will give him a chance as lesser goalies have gotten numerous chances before, even after their primes were done. If he does return, I'd say split the games about 60/20, with Howard playing around 60 games.

Ville Leino continues to dominate out there. Wouldn't it be funny if he's lifting the Cup by season's end.

Tyler Kennedy would have to be their captain.

As much as I hate to admit it, Chicago did something we couldn't do. They played a great 3rd period against San Jose and scored a key goal late. Also, they overcame some s***ty officiating, which is something the Wings couldn't do either. You have to be able to overcome that adversity instead of blaming it exclusively for the loss. Also, I'm impressed with Niemi. He may look like a doll-faced idiot, but he has been awesome for them since the first round, where I thought he struggled.

Maybe during the questionnaire session, they could ask the girls which team they think will win. Damn. Fat Albert scored.

Hawks are lucky Franzen doesn't play for them. BTW, tonight is the Miss America Pageant. I'm rooting for an extra long OT session which puts NBC in a bad situation.

How could you, Brutus? Keep Lilja and get rid of the crap like Meech and Lebda. If Ericsson sucks again next year, get rid of him too.

Blue Jackets Can't believe you've never heard of the Macon Whoopee. They've been around for a while now.

Ovechkin got a lot of crap from the media for losing to Montreal, despite scoring 10 points in that series. It clearly wasn't his fault that the rest of his teammates choked in that series but everyone pointed the finger at him. The media kept talking about how Crosby has surpassed Ovechkin as a player because of the Caps loss and that Crosby is a better leader and all that s***. Well, if I'm not mistaken, Crosby scored 5 points in this series and only 1 goal. He choked big time in this series, and didn't play nearly as well as Ovechkin did against this same team, scoring around half as many points. I want to hear the hockey media blame Crosby for this loss the same way they did Ovechkin. I know that probably won't happen, but it should. He was completely invisible here just like against us in the Finals the last two years.

Nystrom has Swedish blood, so he'd be a great fit here. Winchester is a great choice because of his size. It's been forever since we had a forward over 6'4 who could play gritty.

I love seeing that Jonathan Toews/Tyler Kennedy billboard, with the Cup in the background. Priceless.

Out of the 5 starting goalies still remaining in the playoffs, Nabokov is the only one who was expected to be a starter at the beginning of the season. The other guys were all projected backups. Remember how 10 years ago you needed a Hasek, Roy, Brodeur or Belfour to win the Stanley Cup? Hell, it seemed like those guys were playing for the Cup every year against each other. Well, the biggest names now in hockey amongst goalies are guys like Luongo, Brodeur, Miller, Lundqvist and Kiprusoff. Of course, those guys are nowhere to be found every year in the playoffs. Their teams don't usually make deep playoff runs. Also, I remember how as recently as the 2002 Olympics, countries like Sweden, Finland and Slovakia were thought of as lacking in the goaltending department as compared to the other nations. Obviously, that's not true anymore as there are some great goalies from each of those countries. I guess this thread isn't really a complaint as much as an outlook on how strange the NHL is nowadays in terms of goaltending. Seemingly, teams can just plug in backups that no one has ever heard of, and those guys can take their teams on a long run. This has happened before in league history in isolated cases, but not to the extent we've seen in recent memory.

So if we kept Leino, does that mean we'd have come back from 3-0 down?