Sunday, December 6, 2009

Peepin' Foes: Detroit Red Wings

No rest for the wicked: the Rangers are back in action tonight as they return to the Garden to face Original Six foe and the bastards who stole the 1950 Stanley Cup from us, the Detroit Red Wings.

Where We Are: Trying to pull off two wins in two days. Dream the impossible dream boys.

Where They Are: Detroit is playing their third game in four days and are coming off of a really tough shootout loss to the Devils last night. The Red Wings rallied to come back from 3-1 to force overtime and a shootout where Patrik Elias finished them off. Quite surprisingly, Detroit is in 10th in the West - that's right, the mighty Wings are not even in a playoff position.

Who To Watch For: No Marian Hossa (Chicago), no Mikael Samuelsson (Vancouver), no Jiri Hudler (KHL), no Valtteri Filppula (injured), no Jason Williams (injured), no Nik Kronwall (injured) and no Johan Franzen (injured). And yet they still have Pavel Datsyuk and that other Swedish Henrik guy, Hank Zetterberg, so they will still be tough. Ville Leino was supposed to come in and help fill some of the missing offense and, in screwing my fantasy team, hasn't done much of anything.

What To Watch For: Just watch Nick Lidstrom because you will likely not see another defenseman of his caliber for a long, long time ... if ever. Brian Rafalski has been underwhelming but, considering the damage he used to do to us when he was a Devil, he can not be overlooked. Dan Cleary, Todd Bertuzzi and especially Tomas Holmstrom will go hard to the Ranger crease so the blueliners need to be even tougher than they were in Buffalo.

What We'll (Hopefully) See: No let-down from Saturday. Chris Drury not to suck for the second straight game. More secondary scoring. MDZ and Gilroy to watch and learn from Lidstrom, but preferably not when they are on the ice with him. Jimmy Howard to be abused by Gabby. A good, loud actual sellout crowd in the Garden.

Also Check Out: Able To Yzerman over at Kukla's Korner, George Malik's blog and over at SBN they are Winging It In Motown.

6 comments:

Andrea said...

Not surprising I guess, but I hadn't seen this in any local reports. A tidbit out of Canada:

http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Hockey/NHL/2009/12/05/12053776-sun.html

Scotty Hockey said...

That is Bruce "Malkin to the Kings" Garrioch - the guy is almost as bad as Eklund when it comes to bullshit rumours ...

Unknown said...

I'm going into the match positive. I think we are going to win! This time I dont have to lie believing that..

Andrea said...

Ah! Good to know.

I'm with Kalle: Optimism!

Anonymous said...

Like clockwork Lundqvist fucked up again in the last 2 minutes of the game! Sather trade Lundqvist for Giguere tonight if you want any chance of making the playoffs! Throw Lisin and Kotalik in the deal as well because they suck too!

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SportsSoundOff.net