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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Comments (7)add comment

OFace said:

...
Datsyuk has this ability to make any player on the opposing team feel stupid.
 
March 07, 2010 | url
Votes: +1

OFace said:

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I stand corrected. Datsyuk has this ability to make any amount of players at any given time on any opposing team feel stupid.
 
March 07, 2010 | url
Votes: +1

waltdetroit1 said:

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I know his history but Huet does scare me, ... well just a little. The Caps picked him up at the trade deadline in 2008. He went 11-2 standing on his head (& the Caps were no defensive juggernaut)to get the Caps into the playoffs. He took the Flyers to 7 games in the 1st round. He can get hot. (maybe he is a shapeshifter)

Abbie will get the call as we are in a struggle to qualify for the playoofs. If our position was more secure, I'd love to see Mattias Ritola, Jan Mursak or Tomas Tatar play. On Filpp's line?
 
March 08, 2010
Votes: +0

Rob B said:

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I've never had a serious charley horse before so I'm not familiar with what kind of pain Bert is dealing with but I don't think we'll be forced to call anyone up. Doesn't sound like he'll miss time, and if he does miss the Calgary game I'd figure Meech would play as the 12th forward with something like:

96-13-93
11-40-51
20-43-17
14-33-29 (obviously Datsyuk, Zetterberg and Filppula would be double shifting and a lot of those lines would be fluid concepts throughout the game)
 
March 08, 2010 | url
Votes: +0

Rob B said:

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P.S. you're on my blog roll and I'm not on yours. *sad face*
 
March 08, 2010 | url
Votes: +0

KyleKujawa said:

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And that's how it will stay!

Just kidding, all rectified now. Thanks for letting me know, I really gotta get it in gear here. The Wings blogosphere seems to grow by the day and me updating my list every six months just isn't going to cut it.

Walt - It seems like Bert's alright, but I do think Abdelkader would have been the one to come up. I do think a scorer would have been nice for Fil's line, but you're right, it's not exactly the right time to be breaking in a new player. I'm glad Bert's good to go. It just looked so bad and the Wings haven't caught a break all year so I assumed it was at least a two month injury. Gotta get out of that mindset.
 
March 08, 2010
Votes: +0

r0bert8841 said:

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Yo Kyle RWC has written in its weekly report that Stolyarov played his first game the other day but I have no idea where he got that info because I have been checking my Russian RSS feeds for him and none have been updated since the January article I sent you! He must be using his inside source.
 
March 08, 2010
Votes: +0

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