And the verdict is in: SIEVE
Written by Kyle Kujawa   
Sunday, 07 March 2010 15:21

 

IL: Nashville Predators v Chicago Blackhawks
Nice save, bro.
I rag on Cristobal Huet quite a bit around here, and I've noticed that there's still a good group of people who just look at his stats and disagree with me. Well, for all those people... this game is why Huet is not a good goalie. He's a decent regular season goalie, playing behind a spectacular defense, with absolutely no big game ability. It was subtly very hilarious that Pierre kept bringing up the fact that Huet has trouble "tracking the puck." That's just fancy talk for "watching and anticipating the play." His positioning baffles me, and I hardly consider myself a goaltending expert.

Huet is why I'm not afraid of Chicago. Nabokov is why I'm not afraid of San Jose. Bring on the 8th seed.

  • I don't think Todd Bertuzzi did a thing right in the first period. He wasn't making stupid plays -- no penalties or blind passes thankfully, but he waited too long when he should have shot, he shot when he should have passed, he just looked all kinds of out of sync.
  • However, Bertuzzi was the team's best player in the second period. He made an impact every time he touched the puck.
  • Congrats to the two dozen or so people I have in mind that are secretly happy he got hurt. If you're all right, I'm sure the Wings will start scoring in bunches and they'll stop blowing leads without such a terrible liability on the ice. Ugh. It looked pretty bad.
  • I like Jimmy Howard.
  • I'm finally seeing some of the Brian Rafalski I saw wearing the red, white, and blue two weeks ago. He's surprisingly competent defensively.
  • On that note, Brad Stuart has been very quiet lately, which means he's doing his job. Not sure where this notion that he's tired is coming from.
  • I was going to say that I hoped Johan Franzen enjoyed his day off. Then I realized that this game was at the United Center, home to over 50% of Franzen's injuries. Smart thinking by him to play smaller than Patrick Kane and make sure he stays healthy.
  • I can't help but notice that Nick Lidstrom greatly outperformed supposed "better" defensemen in Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook. Guess I'm just a homer though.
  • I called Bertuzzi and Dan Cleary out for being invisible the other day, but I forgot the guy who's been so invisible that I forgot he was invisible: Drew Miller. I like him much better in the checking/energy role, opposed to one of Valtteri Filppula's wingers. If you've got those two together on a line, you're going to need an incredible finisher to make it useful.
  • As tempting as it might be to bring up a guy like Brad May in place of Bertuzzi, I really hope they look at Mattias Ritola, or even Jan Mursak or Tomas Tatar. Just a pipe dream though, it'll probably be may. UPDATE: Painkillers are too strong, I completely forgot about Justin Abdelkader. They better call him up over May.

Huge game on Tuesday. Hope the 2nd period Wings team shows up, ideally with a healthy Bertuzzi.

 



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