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Oh hockey, must you break my heart?
So the great thing about being a european hockey fan (besides not having to be so completely and overly worried about a potential lockout) is that it's already almost time for season opener! Less than a month in fact! And the pre-season games have already started!
.. Expect I'm having hard time trying to feel exited about the upcoming season, since my team is continuing doing what they've done for a couple of years already, by which I mean sucking. So far, they've played three games, and lost all of them. Sure it's just the pre-season, but it still isn't very confidence inducing. I mean they had a total of minute and a half worth of 5 on 3 advantage in one game, and couldn't score a single goal in that time, what even! I don't care about how well you're dominating the game, you need to score some goals to win!
Also, their coach continues to be complete ass, who can't admit when the team needs to improve. It was infuriating when he was coaching our national team to not win, and it's infuriating now. I mean focusing on the positive is one thing, but staying stuff like "we had some great presence out there tonight and really gave it our all", when you've just lost 6-0, is just sticking your head in the sand.
And yet, he does so like to find faults in our national teams current head coaches performance, even when the team is winning. Remind me, which one of you was the one to coach the team to it's second ever world championships in his third year of coaching and which was the one you couldn't deliver the same in his five years as the bench boss? Wasn't you? Then shut the hell up.
Why was this guy hired in the first place? I mean it wasn't like he'd just gotten fired by another team, due to them being at the bottom of the standings, prior to coming to work for you? Oh he was.. Well, I guess they were having some financial issues then, that we they to literally scrape the bottom of the barrel. What was that? One of the richest teams in the league? So why the hell do they have such a suck-y coach then?!
Remember the time when we won the championship four times in five years? 'Cause I do. And I'd really, really like to go back to that, instead of maybe barely making it to the playoffs, never mind getting past the first round..
On other news, I'm thiiis close to finishing the Finnish Hockey Primer. Sorry it's been taking so long, my summer ended up being a lot busier than I had planned, and as such I haven't have all that much time to work on it. But I am hoping to send it of for beta reading by tomorrow night.
.. Expect I'm having hard time trying to feel exited about the upcoming season, since my team is continuing doing what they've done for a couple of years already, by which I mean sucking. So far, they've played three games, and lost all of them. Sure it's just the pre-season, but it still isn't very confidence inducing. I mean they had a total of minute and a half worth of 5 on 3 advantage in one game, and couldn't score a single goal in that time, what even! I don't care about how well you're dominating the game, you need to score some goals to win!
Also, their coach continues to be complete ass, who can't admit when the team needs to improve. It was infuriating when he was coaching our national team to not win, and it's infuriating now. I mean focusing on the positive is one thing, but staying stuff like "we had some great presence out there tonight and really gave it our all", when you've just lost 6-0, is just sticking your head in the sand.
And yet, he does so like to find faults in our national teams current head coaches performance, even when the team is winning. Remind me, which one of you was the one to coach the team to it's second ever world championships in his third year of coaching and which was the one you couldn't deliver the same in his five years as the bench boss? Wasn't you? Then shut the hell up.
Why was this guy hired in the first place? I mean it wasn't like he'd just gotten fired by another team, due to them being at the bottom of the standings, prior to coming to work for you? Oh he was.. Well, I guess they were having some financial issues then, that we they to literally scrape the bottom of the barrel. What was that? One of the richest teams in the league? So why the hell do they have such a suck-y coach then?!
Remember the time when we won the championship four times in five years? 'Cause I do. And I'd really, really like to go back to that, instead of maybe barely making it to the playoffs, never mind getting past the first round..
On other news, I'm thiiis close to finishing the Finnish Hockey Primer. Sorry it's been taking so long, my summer ended up being a lot busier than I had planned, and as such I haven't have all that much time to work on it. But I am hoping to send it of for beta reading by tomorrow night.
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But on the other hand, in 2004-05 SM-Liiga season didn't actually feel the presence of NHL'ers all that much in the end. Other than maybe drawing a little more crowds to the stands (which I can't be sure of, since I haven't seen any actual records of the fact, just the vague recollection that many clubs did exceptionally well financially that year), as far as production goes, well.. Looking at the top 10 point scorers of the season, there isn't a single NHL player there. Which is weird, because there were a lot of NHL'ers in the SM-Liiga as well.
So if the lockout happens and we do get a lot of players coming over here and they make a real difference, then yey. But if they just make a contract and then end up not playing a single came (No Selänne, why would I be talking about you. :p) then I'd much rather be watching them play across the pond.
As for the Worlds.. Having a lot of NHL players there would be super-great. I personally live about a two and a half hour train ride from Helsinki, and since Slovakia is playing there this year, I'm definitely planning on going to at least one game, assuming that they keep the ticket prices reasonable (no way am I paying more than a hundred euros for them, when even fifty will be taxing my budget to the max.) But the only that's going to happen is if the whole season gets canceled, which I understand is still just the worst case scenario. Problem is, and what I'm really worried about, is that we could end up in a situation similar to 1995 (as much as I hate to say that anything that happened in -95 is in anyway a bad thing..), where they just start the season late, and then play longer, meaning that by the time Worlds roll around, they haven't even finished with the regular season yet, and we get a total of zero NHL'ers at WC. Which would suck.
And yeah, my team is really great at the whole, cry your heart out thing. Partly because they lack any kind of consistency. Meaning that they're either really bad for a long time, to the point that they spent most of the '90s in the lower divisions, and then suddenly they're completely dominating the whole league for a few years. So just when you've gotten used to not excepting much from them, they go and win the play-offs 12-0. And then when you start thinking that yeah, we've been doing really great for a while now, maybe this will last, they finish the regular season last.
And then there was that one time, when we had one of the most promising prospects of the current decade coming from our junior team, and for some reason decided that' hey, how about screwing him over by giving him a bull shit contract. And when that resulted in him regarding the contract as non-valid, which it was, and signing up with another team, trying to make the courts force him to come back to playing with us. Awesome team managing that..
Pretty much the only thing missing from the primer is me picking out which gold celebration vids to include, which is surprisingly hard, since I'd really just like to put all of them there, since they're made of awesome, and also because I keep having to remind myself that I'm supposed to work on the damn thing, not look highlight films about last years final over and over again..
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And shit, I hadn't considered the fact that we might end up with a half-season lock-out (stupid of me) and a shitty Worlds attendance. That better not happen, or I will cry.
Your team sounds like tons of fun ^_^ Fail-tastic team-management is one of the more rage-inducing parts of hockey, but it's so prevalent that I pretty much consider it a part of the game nowadays. That's kind of sad.
Heh, there's nothing wrong with watching highlight videos over and over. It's kind of like doing research. Sort of.