Echolalia

Toews is the media's response to Crosby. Crosby is consistently spoon fed to us as the best player in the East, and now they see this young kid from Chicago who just won the Cup so he must be the Western Conference Sidney Crosby. Apparently that makes him the best player over here.

I've been riding wood (that's what she said) my entire playing career and they have always worked well enough. At the very least I've never broken a stick in play before. Anyway, yesterday I was out with my buddy who was shopping for a new stick and the place we went to had a bunch of deals on 09 models that they were trying to get rid of. The combination of the deal and my friend's thorough convincing resulted in me taking a chance on the Warrior Dolomite 09 Olympic model. I wanted to fly with the Finland edition but they didn't have a 100 flex with anything but Canada so I went with that. I haven't tried it out but I'm looking forward to our next game. My buddy keeps going on about how my shot and stick-handling will be much quicker, so I'm anxious to see what kind of changes, if any, occur. So what do you guys roll with? Wood, composite? What sort of flex and lie do you prefer? etc etc blah

My first game with the ol' Dolomite saw me rip a shot past the goalie from the top of the face-off circle. Its the hardest shot I've taken since messing my wrist up a couple months ago.

Go talk to Yzerman, Lilja.

Ugh, I don't want to see Yzerman and Howe's numbers hanging besides basketball giants.

Matt said a bit ago that he's pretty busy with the website overhaul, but he hoped to get it up sometime around the start of the season (although most likely a bit afterward).

It would be best for him to learn how to properly beat other players' asses down so us LGWers forget about his mishaps after a good ragdoll tossing.

I wonder if Brooks Orpik was involved...

I hope Abby knows he's setting the standard for himself over 82 games.

Ritola for Steve Downie, straight up. Yzerman owes us a favor.

Welp I gave it a good 90 minutes of breaking-in this morning. First and foremost this is going to take some getting used to. I'm not used to how light the stick is in my hand compared to a good piece of wood. Consequently, some of the passes I tried to receive slipped under my blade as I didn't have to brace/give in to a pass as much with the wood stick. I also need to adjust to the Kovalchuk blade because I've been riding with the Coffey for a bit too long, so my shot was going all over the place today (0 goals). As for the speed of the shot: my shots were certainly quicker and my release was much faster but I'm having more trouble leaning into my wrist shots compared to a wood stick. Sometimes when I lean in to get that bend in my stick its like my blade can't grip the ice and I end up just pushing my stick forward without any bend and I give off a weak-ass "shot" that's probably 15-20mph. I never had this issue with the wood stick, and I'm slightly confused because as far as friction with the ice/puck, I'm using the same tape on the blade. I'm assuming that I need to lean in on the shaft with the stick more adjacent to my body to get more of my force downward instead of diagonally and I'm going to focus on making that adjustment in the coming games. It sucks, though, because I could get a good flex in my wood stick while the puck hung out a couple feet in front of me without my blade slipping away from me. Ultimately I need to get a couple more hours with this thing before I can make an official review on it, but right now I'm saying for me personally there is definitely an adjustment phase when switching from wood to composite.

Frankly I'd rather Miller be pushed through waivers. His skill is peaked and we know what we have with him. While we don't know where Ritola will peak or whether he'll turn out to have more upside than Miller or not, I think its worth the risk in this case. If he's better than Miller, great! We now have another top-9, maybe even top-6 player in our arsenal of young talent. If he's worse than Miller so what? Miller was playing the bottom line anyway and those guys are a dime a dozen in the NHL. I hope that this whole "Miller has a spot" thing that keeps getting spewed out of Babs and Kenny's mouth is something of inspiration for Ritola. Maybe a way to see him playing at his absolute hardest to see if he has what it takes. Who knows?

I hope not because he has really stood out throughout the preseason.

The breaking is definitely a concern for me, although like I said: I've never had a (albeit granted) wood stick break on me. I rarely rip slap shots; I'm more a quick release wrister/snap shot kind of guy, and I try to play a more finesse style so hopefully I can get some good mileage out of it. In any event, it comes with a 30 day warranty so if it does break maybe I'll get lucky and it will happen on day 29. I'm doing drop-in tomorrow so I'll hit you guys with a report. PS here's my baby: http://www.hockeyworld.com/index/page/product/product_id/7010/category_id/7520/product_name/Warrior+Dolomite+Canada+Grip+Composite+Hockey+Stick-Sr The only reason its more expensive than the normal dolomites is because its the Olympic model. Nothing really particularly special about it outside of it being on sale (cheaper than 169 at the store, too). Went with the Kovalchuk.

Downey really did a good job of preventing Brook Orpik from taking liberties that night, didn't he?

I came in here to say Salei is more like this year's Drake than anyone else, but I see I was already beaten to the punch.

I would like some sort of discount for home-grown talent, although I think introducing this idea would create quite a bit of problems that aren't so apparent. This type of system would further reward bottom-feeder teams as once they're stocked up on 1st round talent, those players (or a % of those players/ % of their cap, however you want to look at it) are exempt from the Cap, at least partially. That means teams like Pittsburgh and Chicago get to add quite a few top guns in addition to the home-grown talent they have. This polarizes the parity that the league is looking for. All the top names will be gobbled up by 1st generation up-and-coming teams, and the next gen bottom feeders have less to work with.

The girls don't really like how fast he is

What's Tatar doing on the checking line?

The only players who take the preseason seriously are prospects and Brooks Orpik.

Oh Mindfly! I didn't recognize you there.

No kidding. The guy scans the front of the net and everyone is covered, so what does he do? He spins around back into a blanket of Chicago players and gets them all spun up, then feeds in to the point to continue the cycle. Most guys would've just shot the puck.

How did Tatar not score there?

Yikes I would never dream of asking a gal to marry me at a sporting event. Just me, though...

I'm liking Salei so far.