Game Recaps

Sunday, December 09, 2007

12/8 - Preds v. the Quacks

a few random notes;

...tootoo with a fine game. that good forechecking hit simply caused the third goal. good wrist shot off the faceoff, good fight. all in 3:45 of ice time.

...the disallowed goal. after watching the replay several times, the puck is deflected by rads when it is slightly above the waist which makes it extremely close, a call that could have gone either way itself. the refs call it high, you have to simply live with that.

...but i still think the refs missed the call. the rule says you cann't play the puck teammate to teammate with a highstick. so once rads tips the puck with the highstick, if he or a teammate touches it next the ref blows the play dead.

...but that isn't what happened, rads deflects the puck. the puck doesn't go straight to legwand, instead it hits their goalie hiller on the left pad and then kicks off to legwand right outside the right post. so in other words, an anaheim player has touched the puck after the highstick and the puck is then allowed to be touched and played by a pred player.

....admittedly the actual rule is vague in the rulebook. and might mean that the intervening opposing player has to control the puck and not simply touch it to negate the teammate to teammate... watching many games, sometimes refs will let play continue if the puck is touched even the slightest by a guy on the other team, other times they won't unless the other guy actually controls the puck... i've seen it called both ways over the years and don't know which is really correct.

...hamhuis with a good strong game. nice diving backcheck to prevent a semi breakaway with us on the pp in the first. zidlicky and suter with solid games as well.

...in fact except for the one ANA even strength goal, when devries and zanon both got caught reaching for the puck with their sticks instead of playing the body on getzlaf, which in turn allowed him to walk in and cause the chaos that led to the hnidy goal, the defensemen all played a mighty strong game.

...nice to see us win a game, when neither of our regular two scoring lines scores a goal even strength.

...amazing how completely and quickly we seemed to have turned around shots for and against as a team. 10 of 11 games now we have outshot opponents, and most of these games it hasn't even been close. over these 11 games we've actually averaged outshooting the opposition by an almost unbelievable 9 shots per game. not sure anyone has exactly figured out why this has happened. but note, it begin to happen once the erat-arnott-dumont line figured out they needed to run this behind the net offense down low. this is the line racking up shots game after game for us. 9 again last night for these three guys.

...of course, last night's shot counter was a little deceptive... even strength we outshot them 17-16.. however we had 15 shots on net in those almost 16 minutes of pp time.

...the pp. sigh. to be honest, we looked better than 1 for 10, especially early. puck possession was great on many of the pp's we had.. we did everything right, well except put the puck in the net.

...if weber will re-find his shot from the point and begin to make teams pay for sagging back on our forwards, i think we will magically be ok on the pp.

...give credit to smithson and ortmeyer. a big goal to ice this game.

a good win. a win we really needed.

Pred303guy writes some of the most succinct and bright observations about each of the Predators games. His nickname is "The Professor" for his keen insights and recall of details from each game. He's also fair-minded. He loves the Predators, but he calls 'em like he sees 'em.

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