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Let's try this again...
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Pre-game preview from NHL.com
ToTT

Stories we are following:

• Oilers have lost something like 8 straight and could easily break the franchise record of 11 straight.
• Quinn bag skated - er - held an up-tempo practice to try to get the message across to his team that effort has been clearly lacking.
• Oilers are without their #1 (Khabibulin), their best player (Hemsky) and it seems only Dustin Penner has been performing to expectations.
• The Cannots are coming off a tidy 6-2 win against a Top Team (PGH) that played its #3 and 4 goalies - overconfidence clearly a concern.
• Mitchell won't be playing tonight, after getting hit by Malkin at the end of the last game. Rome draws in...
• MayRay and SOB scuffle at practice; CalPuck triumphantly proclaims 'Lovers' spat tearing apart the Cannots' locker room... '
• The Cannots (58 pts) are currently in 6th place with two games in hand on Calgary (58), and one on Colorado (62), so Vancouver needs to get these two points and keep the 'Lanche within reach.
• It's weird to me to consider the Cannots are Top Five in GF when they are just a season or two removed from being a defensive team; oh, and they're also in the Top Ten in GA...
• Hank continues to lead the league in points... If his performance regresses back to his usual PPG pace, he'd still break the 100 points barrier for the season.
• Bureaux is now tied with Hank for most goals (21) on the team after scoring something like 11 goals in the last 7 games.
• Cannots are 3-1 against the Oilers so far this season, with Hank getting 5 points in 4 games, while Daniel also has 5 pts. but over just two games.

This game, on paper, has all the makings of another 6-0 dismantling... But the Oilers are hungry and don't want another embarrassment at home at the hands of a divisional rival; the Cannots could easily look past this game and underestimate the Oil... 3-2 SO win - Vancouver.

The last two offseasons the Canucks have admitted that Luongo probably plays too much and it can be detrimental to his health or late-season play, and both times I'm pretty sure they've said that "this year will be different". Even with the exclamation marks surrounding this game (Canucks having beaten the defending Cup champs; comparatively long layoff; off-ice distractions; tongue-lashing of Edmonton by Quinn), this still seems like a pretty optimal game to give Raycroft a start. (Notwithstanding the idiotic "taking offense to facing the backup" phenomenon).

Yet Luongo will be starting this game as well as tomorrow night in Vancouver, and it's that much more unsettling to see a Vancouver Sun article entitled Can a goalie play 82 games? Luongo would like to try this morning on the topic. And Iain MacIntyre agrees with the decision to, basically, never play the backup on the basis that "other goalies play 70 games." Unless he's going to conduct a study on how that affects them, or acknowledge the difference between 70 and 80 games, I'm not sure I can agree with him.

It's like they forget going into the season when they make their proclamation that "every two points matters" (edit: I see Luongo actually acknowledges this annual pronoucnement and its subsequent forgetting in the article) and on an ad hoc basis determine that every start is too dangerous to risk not having him in the lineup. I really hope they're not going to pay for what I think is short-sightedness.

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I read that article, too, and thought the same thing. Never mind that they are going on a 14-game road trip with the Winter Olympics in Vancouver sandwiched in between, with Luongo likely at the very least dressing for one or two of those games...

1-1 after 1,Gagner for the Oil and.........you guessed it,Burrows with his 22nd for the Nucks



GO CANUCKS GO!!!!

2-1 Eulers after 2

C'mon you fuckers,Just win!!!



GO CANUCKS GO!!!!

Stupid-ass Oilers, couldn't hold that lead, couldja?

Pretty good call Tcl but it was 3-2 in ot not the SO
Henrik with 3 more points to hit 70 on the season aqnd take a 5 point lead on Ovechkin

The Oilers played as tight a checking game as I've ever seen them play and the penalty in OT was bogus if you ask me but I can see how the ref thought it was a foul.Fuckface Bettman was also in attendance and he did not look happy for some reason

I pity the Quinn.

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GO CANUCKS GO!

flame me for my bias, but the last two penalties were both dives. the last one was grossly obvious, so much so that any ref that misses it ought not be in the league....

The guys on the post game show thought the last 2 were pretty "lucky" penalties too. Kinda makes up for the nashville game

Yeah, the Oilers must be shaking their heads at both calls. Saw the highlights on NHL Network; that penalty in the last five minutes of the period looked pretty marginal but to J21's point, if it's a penalty in the first five minutes, it should be a penalty in the last five. Given that there were only six penalties I think to that point during the entire game, I wonder if the refs were watching the game a little more closely out of boredom... The OT penalty was also marginal - I'd be pretty pissed, too if I were Quinn. But if we've learned anything this last month, it's that the referees' authority is absolute, regardless of whether they make bad call or not: there's no point arguing it because it won't change the outcome.

In any event, take the two points as it keeps the blasted Avs within striking distance. Bastards.

EDIT: The NHL Network also showed a missed interference call in the third, I think, when MayRay took out Grebeshkov...

Yep, consensus in the HFBoards thread was definitely that the Canucks lucked out with the penalty. I don't think it was a dive so much as Raymond just fell lunging for the puck. I'm sure the stick didn't help, but it didn't really appear to be much of a trip either. As one poster phrased it, "Bettman on the way out of the rink: 'There. Now leave me the fuck alone!'"

So a bit of karma indeed (I guess according to the Ron MacLean subtext, it's totally fine to affect the outcome in one game because of events in another), although there is a difference between contoversial calls leading to an the extra point in an OT game versus deciding a tie game in regulation.

I took tCL's point about boredom as tongue-in-cheek, but it's actually a bit of an interesting point on psychology -- in a game with less happening for the officials, you have to wonder if they might be looking more for a reason to do something, a subconscious self-justification. Think about when you're critiquing a relatively well-composed piece of writing -- you harp on things like commas and paragraph spacing, since you can't say that much about the content.

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