Sometimes, the birds just won’t sing
What can you say? Once again, it wasn’t for lack of effort.
The start of the game was as loud and as enegetic as I can remember a playoff game being. The boys battled hard. They went to the net and hit the guys in black and yellow, but at the end of the day, if you can’t score goals, you won’t win games. (unless you’re like, bowling or something)
I’m no expert (if you want educated opinions what the fuck are you doing here?), I’m a Montreal Canadiens fan. I said, even before this series started, that this team could take down the Bruins a la Andrew Raycroft’s career. Do I still believe that? My heart does, my brain doesn’t. But then again, my brain told me to expose myself to my 85 year old great-aunt when I was 4, so who knows.
What’s the difference between last year’s team and this year’s team? Other than Yvon Pedneault being replaced by that clown they call Benoit ‘AI-YAI-YAI!’ Brunet, not much. Let me say something, a general manager’s job is to improve his team from the day the season ends to the day a new season starts. Did Bob Gainey do that? Yes, that is undisputable.
He added size and grit in Georges Laraque, he added creativity and offensive threat with Alex Tanguay, and finally, he added a right hand shot, a veteran presence and a hip-hop mogul in Robert Lang. Like I said, he made his team a better unit than what it was the year before.
But injuries are as much part of the game as anything else, and guys going down (hehe) have hurt this team. That, also, is undisputable.
What other team in the NHL, let alone the East, can lose its top point-getter three times during the season and still be able to be competitive? First it was Tanguay going down, and then Robert Lang, followed by Andrei Markov. Not to mention the other absences here and there of players like Saku Koivu, Chris Higgins, Guilaume Latendresse, Mathieu Dandenault, Mike Komisarek, Marcel Hossa, Carey Price, etc.
Going back to last night’s game, there wasn’t much difference between the two teams in terms of puck posession and chances on goal. The major difference was that they capitalized on their chances and we didn’t. That and the fact that our powerplay has a harder time setting up than a fake Gucci salesman in New York’s Chinatown.
When you go into a game with Yannick Weber and Ryan O’Byrne as your third defensive pairing, it’s not looking too good. But even with the absences of all those key guys, they still battled. They took the lead, they came back into the game, but at the end, it just seems that Boston always find a way to score.
Do we deserve to be 0-3 down in this series? I’ll let you be the judge of that, but if you ask me, I’ll say no. Games 1 and 3 could have gone either way, but that’s the way the sports gods make the cookie crumble.
Don’t get me wrong, like I said before, we faced the hardest team we could have faced. Claude ‘FUCK YOU BOB GAINEY!’ Julien has his team playing smart, discplined hockey and they’re very hard to beat, but if a couple of bounces had gone our way in terms of game-play and injuries this could have been very different.
Is it over? Only two teams have ever come back from a 0-3 series deficit, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned watching this team, it’s that they always adore digging themselves the biggest hole possible to dig themselves out of.
I’m not saying a comeback is about to happen, so don’t go out and bet your wife’s boobjob on tomorrow’s game, but I’ve seen way too many strange things happen in sports to count anything out.
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