Up and Down

Yeesh.  The ups and downs of a playoff run.  I felt darn good on the walk to work this morning.  I'm all pissed off tonight.  That's a playoff run.  Tonight was a night that a tired team played a fresh team, and at the end of the day, the fresh team played well enough to win.  Corey Tropp.  You wanted to know how the building sounded when it was alive.  It was alive tonight.  And what did you do to make this a win?  Any goals?  No.  You pissed away a lot of good will tonight.  The crowd came and battled, and so did the team.  I'm not taking that away from them.  They played hard tonight, but not well enough to win.  Surrendering a goal a minute after scoring the go ahead goal was really, really bad.  Richie, I know you like a winning lineup.  But with this grind, and fresh and pissed off guys in the press box, you really need to think about getting fresh legs on the ice.  It might have made a difference tonight.  I think you've done a great job with this team so far, but you have the worst schedule in the NHL right now, 15 healthy forwards, and you are not acting like its demanding.  Coach, I believe you need to adjust your thought pattern on this.  

You might have had a full barn on Tuesday if you win this game.  You're looking at 15k again on a weeknight against Detroit on Tuesday.  The players don't understand how deep the wounds are in the fans.  That's okay.  As a fan, I really don't want them to know.  But they need to know that the fan base can't support a lot of games like this.  Which isn't fair to the players.  It was a playoff game.  In the playoffs, equally rested teams square off.  That wasn't the case tonight, and it showed.  Not a lot.  Just a little.  But these are very evenly matched teams, as are most of our games, and the little differences show.  Late in the third period, New York had a little extra, and the CBJ did not.  Thus, a 3-1 loss tonight, with an empty net goal.

This was a hard one to take, especially on the heels of Joey's amazing game winning theatrics last night in Montreal.  A stolen puck, walk in on the goal tender, score, win the game.  Tonight, the guys sitting in a hotel room watching that game did that to us.  While it would be helpful to my own feeble attempts at personal balance to direct an expletive laced stream of invective at those persons of questionable heritage from New York, the bottom line is that they carried the play for most of the night.  An amazing individual effort by Foligno put us on top, which only caused the Rangers to focus enough to put this one away.

Nice little tribute to Nash.  I applauded politely.  Decorum went out the door when he went after Bob.  This was totally instigated by Bobrovsky, no question.  But Nash could have taken the high road.  He didn't.  Funny thing about people from Columbus.  Did you ever notice that Kirk Herbstreit had to move out of town?  That's a successful quarterback from THE Ohio State University.  Collectively, we are a group of people that don't deal well with rejection.  Just saying.  You are the enemy now.  Don't forget it.  And by the way Nash, when the h**l did you start playing at the top of the crease??  I didn't see any of that in Columbus in the last three years you were here.  All I saw was a** first runs at the net.  That team was Rick Nash's team.  New York is not Rick Nash's team, and you are better for it.  And we are better for not having you anymore.  So there it is.

Sorry for the intermittent service.  That would be a kind description of my cable service over the last week.  At any rate, I am up and running again.

So stepping away from my deep personal bitterness about tonight's loss, and my rapidly escalating hatred for the Rangers, the CBJ remain in a playoff position.  Sitting 8th, the second wild card, we would face off against the battered Pittsburgh Penguins.  Sitting third, we'd face off against the red hot Flyers.  We get to play both teams down the stretch, and we'll have a good gauge on where we want to be.  Last night was rapturous, tonight is bitter.  Welcome to the playoff run folks,  I really haven't been this engaged since 2008-09.  And I'm having a lot of fun tonight.

To put it in perspective, the CBJ lost a battle of playoff position tonight against the <insert string of expletives> Rangers.  Maybe that is where we really want to be?!

GO JACKETS!!