AHL- Apolyton Hockey League 08/09 (II): Game On

[Asher]

This week's standings?

[notyoueither]

Week 9

Rank   Team               W-L-T     Pct Pts Last Week Wv Mvs 
1.  Flubber's Folly       40-19-13 .646 93    3-4-1    4  25 
2.  Blaine's Bruisers     41-24-7  .618 89    7-1-0   10   2 
3.  Derelique My Balls    39-26-7  .590 85    6-1-1   11   5 
4.  Road Kill             37-24-11 .590 85    3-3-2    9  14 
5.  Ice Hawks             35-22-15 .590 85    4-3-1    6   1 
6.  Malicious Pacifists   36-26-10 .569 82    3-4-1    5  11 
7.  Haunted House Boos    31-21-20 .569 82    3-3-2    3   6 
8.  The Pantless Pirates  30-30-12 .500 72    4-3-1   12  16 
9.  Televised Hawks       25-33-14 .444 64    7-0-1    8   2 
10. Matthew Modines       25-33-14 .444 64    3-4-1   13   8 
11. Kanadiens             20-37-15 .382 55    1-7-0    2   - 
12. Calamitous Intent     22-41-9  .368 53    4-3-1    1   5 
13. CrONoS_QC             21-42-9  .354 51    0-7-1   14   2 
14. Siddiqui Storm        18-42-12 .333 48    1-6-1    7   1

[notyoueither]

The politicians will be properlly condemned for interrupting hockey season.

[snoopy369]

Holy ****, 7-0-1 ??? I might actually near .500 someday...

[Sparrowhawk]

How do the mighty Florida Panthers go through Alberta with 2 wins? Teams used to fear going through ALberta because of the 2 losses (okay, this was a long time ago)....now they must look forward to the trip!

Florida!!

/me

[Asher]

Their goalies are on their games.

[Sparrowhawk]

Speaking of goalies, in the Auction league (that's the one that I have Brodeur and Fleury who are both currently injured), I recently added two more goalies, figuring if I couldn't win the categories, at least I could ensure I wasn't giving up on them by default, but picking up Budaj and Theodore resulted in another injury, this time to Theodore, so I am once again short goalie games!

I will have to drop pick up another, and I can't seem to find the site where it predicts tomorrows starters (a google search gives me all sorts of predictions of today's starts, but at 11:30 pm local time, even I can make those predictions with 100% accuracy. Guess I will be going with my gut and dropping/picking up the best available one that I think might play tomorrow.

And before anyone points it out, yes I should have added the goalie website to my favourites last time, but apparently I didn't think of that !

[/end ]

/me

[Asher]

I'm having a similar problem with goalies in one of my Yahoos also. My only healthy goalie was Dan Ellis who I dropped because Pekka was kicking ass, then when I picked up Pekka, Ellis started playing again. So, whatever.

[Asher]

Also, hooray for Edmonton beating ****ing ****ty Vancouver.

[Asher]

Originally posted by mrboo123


Not for long. We play each other in the auction league this week with only 5 points difference. Should be a good ass-kicking by me game.

I just demolished you.

And extended my lead...

[Kontiki]

That was a satisfying double beat-down of Flubber.

[mrboo123]

Originally posted by Asher


I just demolished you.

And extended my lead...

Blah, Price just HAD to have the flu this week...

And I wouldn't call 3-6 demolishing. A good win, yes, but not a demolishing.

[Asher]

Originally posted by mrboo123


Blah, Price just HAD to have the flu this week...

And I wouldn't call 3-6 demolishing. A good win, yes, but not a demolishing.

It means I'm at least twice as good as you!

Demolished!

[Imran Siddiqui]

Peter King, who writes a Football column, took part of his column to write about the Chicago Blackhawks as the "Good Guys of the Week":

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/peter_king/12/14/Week15/3.html

The Chicago Blackhawks. The Blackhawks set off on a six-game, 12-day road trip on Nov. 18 -- to, in order, Phoenix, Dallas, Toronto, San Jose, Anaheim and Los Angeles. (Who thinks of these itineraries? Magellan?) In between a Saturday night date with the Maple Leafs and a Tuesday noon flight to San Jose, the players were going to have their one day off on the trip, a Sunday, back home with family in Chicago.

But the day before they played Toronto, the players learned that Stan Tallon, the father of Chicago general manager Dale Tallon, had died after a long battle with Parkinson's Disease in a rural Ontario town, Gravenhurst, two hours north of Toronto. The director of team services, Tony Ommen, told the captains that he could try to arrange a team trip to the Sunday night wake in Gravenhurst if they wanted to go. But if they did, of course, they'd be giving up their only day off on a grueling trip in a two-week period. It was a day most of the players had plans to do something, if only to watch football on TV, sleep all day, Christmas-shop, hang with family.

"Guys like their time off, that's for sure,'' Patrick Sharp, an assistant captain, said via cell phone. "But this was something, when we got together, we felt we had to do. Dale's a part of us.''

The team meeting was brief and to the point, and there was no objection from a single player: The players would stay over in Toronto, surrender the day off, and bus up to the wake in mid-afternoon on country roads with a fresh blanket of snow. Ommen arranged two buses, one for the coaches and staff, and one for the 23 players on the trip. In all, about 50 members of the Blackhawk traveling party made it to the W.J. Cavill Funeral Home in Gravenhurst, and when they walked quietly through the side door of the place, Dale Tallon couldn't believe his eyes. He tried to say something.

"I couldn't talk,'' he said. "I just started bawling.''

The players and staff all filed past the open casket and paid their respects to the family, including Tallon's 80-year-old mom, whose mood brightened tremendously. She knew the players from watching the games on satellite TV. Now here they were, her heroes! She had a little crush on the big star, Patrick Kane, whom her son had drafted first overall last year. "Patrick Kane!'' she said, and hugged him and kissed him on the cheek.

"I'm sorry for your loss, Mrs. Tallon,'' Sharp said.

"Ooooh,'' she said. "I enjoy watching you play.''

And then the players sat respectfully among the townspeople for a while, and then they went into a side room to look at the photo display of Stan Tallon's family, which could have been any hockey family in Canada, with shots of Dale as a tyke and moving up through the years 'til he thrilled the family by making the NHL. Before the players left, Dale Tallon told them how touched the family was that they'd make this trip for him.

Last week, Dale Tallon tried to explain why this happened. "I think hockey's unique,'' he said. "In every Canadian town, the hockey rink seems to be the center of the community. Families do so much for their kids and sacrifice for them so they can play. You rise up through different levels, but you never forget how you got there. With these kids on our team, I scouted, recruited and drafted so many of them. Watching them walk through that door made me feel so good about the type of people -- not just the kind of players -- we drafted. I hear so many people talking negatively about the youth of today, but don't underestimate these kids. They're good kids. My mother is there. Her husband of 59 years is laying in a casket next to her. And these kids walked in and she was just on Cloud Nine ...'' And then Dale Tallon got a little misty over the phone.

"I've played for different teams in juniors and the pros,'' said the 26-year-old Sharp, from the Ontario hockey hotbed of Thunder Bay. "And you walk into every locker room and you become brothers. Maybe it's rare in pro sports, but it's not rare in hockey, I don't think. We're all in this together. It goes back to growing up in hockey. My older brother played, I played, and my parents made huge sacrifices to drive us everywhere we had to go. Everyone in this game knows how much family means.''

Said Ommen: "The culture of hockey revolves around family.''

The team boarded the buses to return to Toronto and the charter flight home. But on the way out of town, as happens with two dozen premier athletes who have not eaten in some time, the players saw a McDonalds. They got the buses to stop. Inside, as the Chicago Blackhawks walked en masse into a sleepy McDonald's in rural Canada long after the dinner crowd was gone, a teenage kid behind the register figured out who he was looking at. "Coooooool!'' he said.

"So on the wall there's this big billboard,'' Sharp said. "I guess McDonald's in Canada has hockey cards, and we're looking at this, and there's [teammates] Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews, looking at this. They had cards in this McDonald's series. We all had no idea. So a few of the guys bought the Happy Meals, or whatever, trying to get their cards.''

A couple of weeks have passed. The Blackhawks lost all three games on the last leg of the trip, but no one was blaming the Gravenhurst detour. I asked Sharp if the team had any regrets about attending the wake.

"None,'' he said. "No complaints. We were where we should have been. We'd do it again, 100 times.''

And that's my good news story of the week. Be proud, Canada. You've raised some nice boys.

Blackhawks

[snoopy369]

Blackhawks