Rob Pizzo

On the way into work today I was thumbing through my twitter timeline and noticed Phil Kessel’s name popping up more often than usual. Tuesdays are rec hockey night in the Pizzo household so if something happened after the Leafs blew two different leads against the Islanders, I hadn’t seen it yet. With a little digging I saw what sparked all the Kessel talk was an article in the Globe and Mail written by Jeff Blair in which he talks about the “Fire Burkie” chants heard last night at the Air Canada Centre. For the record, I enjoyed the article and think Blair is a very good writer, however it’s the way the article started that got people all riled up:

He has no goaltender, his leading scorer is a milquetoast, Tom Thumb guy who shrinks even further in front of the cameras and nobody knows for certain whether his team captain has credibility in the dressing room.

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I consider myself a fan of all sports. While hockey may be my first love, that doesn’t mean I’m not sitting on my couch watching football on Sundays, or filling out NCAA bracket, or heading to a Jays game to have a few beers with some friends. However most sports fans will have one sport that they are more knowledgeable about than the others, and they will have others that they know very little about. That’s when we rely on our friends to fill us in.

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Anyone who has spent an afternoon at the track (or watched a horse race at say the OTB or of course on the Score Television network), has heard those words many times. It basically means “the finish line is right there, so make your move now”. Like any good degenerate gambler, I have spent an afternoon or two at the track (I actually worked as a camera man for a while at Fort Erie racetrack. The only problem was because I was an employee, I could not bet. That’s like unleashing a kid in a candy store and telling him he can’t touch a thing). Most teams  have about 10 games left, so if the NHL regular season was a race, we would be hearing the announcer say those 6 words right about now. Since I can’t control the finish of a race in real life (or predict it very well either!), I figured I would use this post to do just that. Here are the five calls I would love to hear if this season was a horse race (yes I have taken the liberty of giving the following teams/players horse names) .

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Like most of the hockey world yesterday, I was really looking forward to the Penguins-Rangers game. I couldn’t wait to see a certain Penguin return to the ice for the second time this season after suffering another concussion. He was back and there were so many questions that we needed answers to .

How would he perform?

How much ice time would he get?

Would he make an immediate impact on a team that already had won 9 straight?

Did his return instantly make the Penguins not only a contender, but a front runner for the Cup?

7pm couldn’t get there soon enough. There are some things that are just talked about so much that after a while there is nothing left to say (Hey Super Bowl, I’m looking in your direction) , you just want to get to it.

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There aren’t too many players in the NHL that would get this much attention for a second comeback from injury than Sidney Crosby. I’m not saying that it’s not deserving, he is after all the game’s best player and he has played a grand total of eight games this season. Will Part 2 of ‘Sid Returns’ be remembered with other great sequels like Terminator 2, the Dark Knight, or The Godfather 2? Or are we looking at the next Speed 2 Cruise Control? We can’t really be sure, but when a sequel comes out we usually look back at the first installment right?

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Certain goalies have expectations at the beginning of the season for many different reasons.

Maybe they are a legend and have performed well year after year.

Maybe they have had recent success and have added some trophies to their mantle.

Or maybe they just signed on the dotted line of a very big contract.

This year we have one of each and for whatever reason, they all stumbled out of the gate. For “The Legend” it was something we were really not used to seeing, the “Trophy Winner” suddenly seemed to forget how to stop the puck, and “The Contract Signer”…well…let’s just say his troubles were humangus big. However they seem to have turned things around for the better.

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The man just keeps doing it. Last night Teemu Selanne scored his 22^nd goal of the season, but more importantly the 1399^th point of his career to make him the highest scoring Finnish player in NHL history (passing Jari Kurri) . This is less than a month after he passed Brenden Shanahan to move into 12^th on the all time goals list. What has always impressed me the most about Selanne isn’t the fact that he has played so long in this league, it’s that he is STILL a relevant player. He leads the Ducks in scoring and sits 26^th in the league in that department…and he is 41! Sometimes we hear numbers like 41…or 1992…and we really don’t fully grasp just how long Selanne has been a great player in this league.

So what way can we fully understand that? With pop culture references of course.

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