Anyway, we not only had our full compliment of players, we actually had 13 guys monday night, which works, but almost everyone bitches about it. (Now honestly, that irritated the shit out of me and here's why; The guys that bitch the loudest about it are the guys that are the least reliable in terms of showing up, on game night, so seriously, shut the fuck up or show up consistently) I will say this bout having 13 guys monday night, at the end of the night, the guys that were tired, (and most of them were) were grateful that there was an extra line on the bench to pick up the slack and a few shifts. And it's not like that extra line was made up of guys grabbed off the street to fill sweaters, it was a line of guys who can play. If it wasn't for that extra line, we would have run out of gas with ten to fifteen minutes to go in that game and would have gotten ourselves laughed out of the rink. They would have slaughtered us.
That being said however, we still lost, and it wasn't a pretty game overall, but we hung with them the entire game. We just, as a team, line by line, didn't have it together. Guys were missing passes where there were clear passing lanes, passing up opportunities to shoot (you don't shoot, you don't score, you don't score, you can't win... It's a simple fundamental principal). And honestly, I think that the extra bodies screwed everyone up just a bit... It seemed to both help us, and hurt us.
Two of those extra bodies the the brothers from the team that I play with in Orleans. They were a little surprised with the speed and tempo of the game, but of course for their first game in the DMHL, we happened to be playing (who I happen to believe, and who most people consider) the best team in the league. There really isn't another team in the league that is on the same level with the Black Dog, a distant second would more than likely be Advance Embroidery... (who we have the pleasure of playing next Monday night), I would say, that from what I have seen so far, that a lot of the teams are relatively close in terms of overall skill level.
I seem to be straying from the topic at hand, the actual game.
Like I said before, we didn't have it, we made bad choices in our defensive zone, and even worse choices in our offensive zone. Bad pass after bad pass, after passing up a good shooting opportunity to make yet another bad pass which would create a turnover that would give the opposition a clean scoring chance. We did a terrible job of getting the puck out of our end, a terrible job of clearing the front of the net and taking (it's a no check league, not a no contact league) the body on their forwards as we spent all night letting them walk right in uncontested for a clean scoring opportunity. I had a lot of work monday night, saw a lot of shots... Games like that are both good and bad. Good because I love all of that action, and it's easier to get into the zone when you are playing in a game where you are getting shelled, but bad because it means that we are doing a lot of things wrong at both ends of the ice.
They scored first in a screen shot that I never got to see, and then again on a broken play in front of the net off a rebound (the fourth or fifth rebound from a barrage of shots, none of which I could manage to get a glove on to get a whistle...) We managed to get one back, shortly after their second goal, but they managed to pick up their third goal on yet another perfectly placed screen shot that just ticked off the inside of the right post and into the net... The good news is that we scored the next two (and also had one called back) to tie the game, but on another poor defensive zone play where we did not manage to clear our own zone, move the puck forward and make some sort of transition into something that resembled an offensive threat, which ultimately resulted in a goal for the bad guys.
The final was 4-3, and even though I spent this entire blog bitching about what a bad game it was on our part, overall, it was a good, fast, hard game, we gave everything that we had to give. Whatever the guys had in the tank, they gave it, and left it all out there on the ice. I was happy with the effort, but unhappy with our end result. I'm usually a very sore loser, but because I feel like I played one of my better games, the loss was a little easier to swallow.
We play Advanced Embroidery next monday night at 10. The loss last night runs our record to 2-2-1 in the DMHL, and my overall record to 4-2-1, with a 2.41 GAA with 1 SO.
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