Hockey coming back means I now have an excuse to watch more sports and do less work. It's great! The first two days of the season have now been and gone. The games that were played were fantastic. If this is how this season is going to go, then I like it. Let's watch more Hockey. Time to get into what happened in the first two days.
With the new divisions and how they're formatted this season, all of Canada is in the Northern Division. This is great. It makes Hockey more exciting for Canada and there is now real competition north of the American border. This saw the Vancouver Canucks play the Edmonton Oilers where Vancouver managed to pull a 5-3 win. The other Canadian game on the opening day of the season saw the Montreal Canadiens (predictably) lose to the Toronto Maple Leafs, so here you go Toronto... Here's your false hope... A winning record.
Nobody really cares about Colorado vs St Louis, but St Louis won 4-1. The defending champions, the Tampa Bay Lightning, had a textbook 5-1 victory over the Chicago Blackhawks which is to be expected with how that Lightning team played in the bubble last year. Here's the opening night game I really want to talk about though... Pittsburgh vs Philadelphia... If you know anything about American Geography, you should know that Pittsburgh and Philly are both in Pennsylvania which can create some sense of relation, but you're forgetting something. This is sports. Hockey, no less. These teams try to behead the other on the ice. The game was a bit of a weird one, but purely just how Hockey goes. It was 3-2 at the start of the third period, but Pittsburgh scored an equaliser with around 17 minutes left to play. I began to worry because I placed a very small wager with friends on this game. Zeke (our newest guy) can vouch for me on the wager. I genuinely thought the Flyers were going to throw away the game, but no... I checked back in on the game a while later and they all of a sudden were up 6-3. I thought maybe they scored one and Pittsburgh went with an empty net, but no... It was legitimately 6-3 with 7 minutes of the game to play. Fantastic for Philly, a 6-3 win.
There were only two games anybody was really paying attention to on the second day of the season. One of them being the battle of New York. Islanders vs Rangers. If you haven't been paying attention, the Islanders are quite good and the Rangers are quite rubbish. This game had an outcome about as predictable as a fork in a microwave. The Rangers had no chance in this game. What happened, you ask? They got killed. That's what happened. The Islanders won this battle convincingly by completely shutting them out 4-0. I mean, come on... Are the Rangers even trying anymore? It's the first game of the season and you get shutout? Pathetic. I'm glad I don't support them.
There was also another sort of derby-style game and it came from the Northern Division. This wasn't the Battle of Alberta or anything... Think of this as more of a Founders Derby for Yammer House between Finn (Major Mong) and myself. You see, he supports the Calgary Flames and I love the Winnipeg Jets. I will start by saying that thing the Jets have at centre ice? Disgusting. Anyway, Calgary basically had a 3-1 lead at the first period break which was a gross display of Winnipeg being Winnipeg, but it seems they remembered who they were playing... It's the Calgary Flames, not the Dallas Stars. This was seen almost immediately. Mark Scheifele scored 34 seconds into the second period for Winnipeg to make it 3-2. Then with just under 5 minutes to go in the period, the Jets had a 5-on-3 man advantage which saw five forwards on the ice and Kyle Connor scores the game-tying goal to head into the third period. In that last set of 20 minutes, nothing happened really and we went to overtime. Guess what happened... Yup... Patrik Laine scores the game-winning goal and the Jets pick up the extra point after being down 3-1. How about that. The Calgary Flames ironically burnt to a crisp. What's funny is that Markstrom, your Goaltender, dragged you to a single point. The rest of the Flames suck.
That's all that really happened in the first two days. Not much, but not nothing. Great season ahead and yeah... a reminder to everyone else in Canada that Winnipeg leads the division.
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