Red Wings 5, Senators 3: Post Game Snipes...

• How great did it feel to drop the puck on the new season? Birds were singing, there were rainbows, and unicorns frolicked in my living room. Actually, that's a lie. It was pouring outside and I was trying to clean pizza sauce off of the couch when the game started, but that's how I felt in my mind.
• I pretty much love Budd Lynch. His voice makes me happy. Sometimes I wonder if the players slip him cash to mispronounce their buddies' names as a joke. That's what I'd do if I was a hockey player, anyway. Either way, I love it.
• I think Ozzie's officially the most beloved goaltending coach of all time, judging by his introduction tonight.
• The pre-game ceremony with Brad McCrimmon's family was nice. It was super sweet (and a little heartbreaking) when his son put on the jersey that he was presented.
• If I had to predict which one of the Wings would give the most awkward hugs, I'd choose Pavel Datsyuk.
• It's a good thing that they switched to those low-energy goal lights at the Joe before the opener what with the Wings scoring five goals and all.
• I know some people want to panic about the three goals that the Wings gave up towards the end of the game, but I'd like them to take a deep breath and a chill pill (yeah, I actually used that phrase). They let up on a big lead late in the game against a lousy team. Of course, in an ideal world, the team would be absolutely flying for every minute of every game, but that would only be realistic if they were all robots. Nick Lidstrom aside, that's just not the case. Let's wait and see for a few more games before we start hyperventilating, ok?
• Speaking of Lidstrom, Datsyuk's apparently been teaching some of his dangling tricks. He pulled a nice move waltzing in on Anderson for his goal.
• Cory Emmerton is evidently the first Red Wing in possession of a Twitter account to score a goal in an NHL game. Because you needed to know that.
• I liked pretty much everything about Bert's goal.
• So how about those special teams, eh?
• We're only one game in, but consider me sold on the Ian White signing. He was impressive all night. I will, however, continue to call him Not-Kirk-Maltby until further notice because I don't handle change very well. That's what happens when you take over the number of one of my childhood icons.
• Please, pretty please let Hudler continue doing what he did tonight all season long.

Final Thought:
There is nothing worse than spending the hockey off-season in Florida. I'd take a never-ending Michigan winter with permanent hockey season over four hockey-less months in this live-in oven.

Caption Fridays Volume One...

Raise your hand if you're excited for the start of the Wings' season!  Everyone?  Ok, good; that's what I thought.  Now raise your hand if you're excited that last season's photo caption game has been moved to Fridays.  Nobody?  Nobody?  Bueller?  Ok, well, not quite what I was hoping for.  Anyway, here's the 2011-2012 season's first installment:

This one was taken during last year's pre-season.  What are the boys up to here?

Red Wings vs. Senators GP...

Red Wings: 0-0-0

Senators: 0-0-0

Red Wing Zen:

Point and Laugh:

This is a thing, apparently.

Video Candy:

Happy Hockey Season, everyone!

Pre-Season Ramblings...

I'm in kind of a strange position right now. This is the first time I've ever found myself gearing up for hockey season somewhere other than Michigan. On one hand, it's been healthy for my bank account since there are no tickets to tempt me or merchandise lining the shelves of every store I go to down here. Mostly though, it's just been sad. I was able to watch part of one pre-season game. One. Don't even think about picking up a newspaper and finding a hockey article. If you're lucky, you might find a box score buried somewhere behind coverage of high school gymnastics and the local little league standings. So here I sit, seemingly the only person in an entire state eagerly awaiting something. I'm sure there are others out there just like me, but they're much fewer and farther between than I'm used to.

But enough about me. After a summer with an unusually high amount of turnover, the Wings enter the season with a lot of questions hanging over them. Some are exciting (ex: Which defensemen are going to win spots?). Some are terrifying (ex: something related to Nick Lidstrom that I'm not willing to actually type). And some are just plain intriguing (ex: Who does Cory Emmerton's brows?). I'm looking forward to seeing how things play out.

The number of games I get to see is going to be limited by the fact that I live in hockey wasteland as well as the fact that my current job has me working a lot of nights. I'm going to do my best to keep up with things here now that hockey's almost, but I can't make any promises. I'm beyond ready to drop the puck on this season, not least of all because it means an end to this long and horrible off-season.

Also, go Tigers!

Another Chapter in Hockey's Summer of Tragedy...

Everyone's heard the news about Ruslan Salei and Brad McCrimmon by now, but I'm guessing most of us are still trying to process it. I know it sounds silly to mourn the loss of someone you've never met before, but passionately following a sports team has a way of forging a strong (and admittedly one-way) bond with the players you root for game in and game out. You listen to their post-game pressers, watch interviews they give about locker room antics, see them grimace in pain out on the ice, and grin from ear to ear as they celebrate a goal or a victory. If you watch enough games, you come to recognize their skating stride or the way they handle the puck without having to see the name or number on their jersey. You take photos during warmups and laugh at the goofy face they happened to be making as you snapped the picture. Little by little you “get to know them.” Obviously you don't really know them, but over time you come to have some sense of their personality. You know which player is the practical joker, which one is the cranky old veteran who wants to yell at the rookies to get off of his lawn, which one has the unwavering intensity every second he's on the ice from warmups to the final horn. Even if they're caricatures in your mind, they become “real” people to you. When they're wearing your team's uniform, you celebrate together and you hang your heads in despair together. You have the same foes, whether they're wearing another team's uniform or black and white stripes. You're on their side, and in a way, they're on yours.

It's no surprise that over the course of as little as one season, you get attached to players. When one loses his life suddenly and unexpectedly, it's jarring. You get slapped in the face with your own mortality. Here were a bunch of guys in the prime of their lives on an airplane heading to a hockey game and in an instant they were gone. We always assume that there'll be a tomorrow, a next week, even a next year. We take that for granted—every one of us does, no matter how hard we try not to—and every once in a while something comes along and reminds us that there are no guarantees. Being able to put faces and personalities with the names you see on the lists of the dead makes it hit home that much harder.

Three men with ties to Detroit lost their lives in the plane crash, so naturally Wings fans everywhere are mourning. It's not just Wings fans who were impacted, though. I was at work when I heard the news this morning and part of my job was to talk to groups of students from all over the country who were just arriving to start their internships. In the course of my spiel, I always bring up hockey by mentioning the Lightning. In one of the groups that I talked to, a girl interjected and asked if I'd heard about the crash. She was a Blues fan and neither one of us was aware that Pavol Demitra was among the dead yet. In our brief discussion about the tragedy, we shared a moment—the kind that bonds the small but passionate hockey community. When I saw Demitra's name listed later, I thought about her; I wondered if her heart broke a little when she heard the news.

Most of all, though, I think about the families the players left behind. Their wives, their kids, their siblings, and their parents who have to pick up the pieces of their lives and find a way to move on. One of my first thoughts when I heard about Salei's death was about his infant daughter who will never know her father. This story also broke my heart, as did the reports of a player's mother who suffered a fatal heart attack upon hearing the news of her son's death. If you thought that we as fans were devastated by the news, imagine what those closest to the players are feeling tonight.

I don't know about you, but I'm ready for this summer of hockey tragedies to be over.

Kris Draper Calls it a Career...

This has been kind of a rough summer for Wings fans. Sure we all breathed a huge sigh of relief when Lidstrom announced that he'll be returning for another season, but we've now dealt with three retirement announcements. At this point, I'm just wondering which of my childhood icons will be hanging up his skates next week.

I never quite got around to writing about Ozzie last week. His announcement came in the middle of a crazy work week that was followed by a long weekend visiting home. I did at least crack open a Pepsi in his honor as I sat at my desk reading the text updates from his conference call. I'm going to miss that guy. He's never gotten the respect he deserves, and that's a shame. If things go as they should, though, he'll end up with his name in the Hall of Fame at some point.

Draper's retirement hit me the hardest of the three we've seen this summer. I'm not really okay with the fact that the entire Grind Line is now retired. I really got into hockey during what I like to call the Glory Years, and those guys were a huge part of that. Obviously I don't know what it's like to be a fan of another team, but I can't imagine another town that loves its blue collar guys like we do here in Hockeytown. Draper never had the kind of stats that his teammates did over the years, but he'll go down as one of the Wings' legends anyway. He was always one of those players who was just so “Detroit” that fans couldn't help but love him. How can you not like a guy who works as hard as he did every single game? He never had those shifts where it looked like he was just going through the motions like you see from some other players around the league. Every time he hopped over the boards, he was going full speed ahead, doing the dirty work, driving opponents crazy, and kicking the Wings into gear when they needed it. And he was almost always grinning. You can't put a value on that, but I promise you that it's more than a dollar.

Red Wings Blogger Roundtable...

Be sure to check out the third installment of this year's Wings Blogger Roundtable hosted over at Winging it in Motown.  We've got a good discussion about the Central Division, Brendan Smith, and who we think is going to exceed or fall short of our expectations this season.  I even bothered to drop in this time around.  Stay tuned for more discussion next week.