My thoughts on tonights game as a whole are the same as I’ve pretty much thought all season.

“WHY AREN’T THEY THE FIRST LINE?”

Niklas Hagman, Mikhail Grabovski, and Nikolai Kulemin are by far the top line on this leafs team and they continued to prove it tonight with a stunning 6-3 win that would’ve been much better if Toskala hadn’t continued to be mediocre.

To start off, I can’t say enough about Grabovski. He’s just simply been on fire the last 4 games, getting six goals and two assists in that time. For a guy who had three goals in his 27 game career with the Montreal Canadiens, he’s looking pretty good now, with 7 in 15. That second rounder is looking less and less meaningful by the night, with him scoring a goal and adding an assist tonight.

Hagman was also fantabulous, potting two goals, with Nik Antropov, Pavel Kubina (my personal favourite leaf), and Alexei Ponikarovsky scoring the other goals. For the 11th straight time, the Leafs have outshot the opponents, and are now 6-5-4 on the year.

Robert Lang, Tomas Plekanec and Captain Saku Koivu scored for the Habs, who fall to an only somewhat amazing 8-2-2. They defintely didn’t go out quietly, with both Tom Kostopoulous and Sergei Kostitsyn being sent off by the end of the game.

Kostopolous made a boneheaded play, hitting Mike Van Ryn from behind. Van Ryn would be hurt on the play, and the most recent word coming from Toronto is that Van Ryn is in the hospital with a “head injury”, though CBC seems to think its just precautionary.

As for Kostitsyn, he felt as if he was entitled to being the 382nd guy of the night to run Mikhail Grabovski, and proceeded to request a fight from Grabo. Grabo seemed just as interested, but thanks to the referees already trying to get Sergei into the box, and Hagman telling Grabo to shut the **** up, that never happened and SKos got an extra ten minutes.

A goal was disallowed with 6:49 left to go, because Chris Higgins apparently doesn’t know where to place his stick.

All in all, a good game. Also, the pre-game ceremony was great. They had the normal HOF game honoring, plus their rememberance day extravaganza rolled into one. It was quite nice, really.

So this is my first blog, hopefully it doesn’t totally suck.

I think the first blog is definitely going to be the hardest to find something to write about, but I believe to have found a good subject.

First of all, I’m a goalie, I play for my HS team and I play for the Leitrim Hawks. now onto my point, my high school received a huge boost 2 games into our season when a kid by the name of German arrived from Russia and joined our team, our first game he had no goals, but neither did anyone else on our team, possibly because he is so much smaller then most people. He may not have scored but we noticed several things from him. He has mad dangles, amazing speed and his head is on a swivel. Our second game with him finished in a 4-4 tie, where he scored 2 goals, the first goal he just had good body position and the puck went off his leg and in. The second one he got a partial breakaway yet got haled down, but we received no penalty shot… because even while sliding on his front he managed to poke the puck through the goalies legs and in. I would have to say it wasn’t a fluke, cause he did that twice for us. He played 4 games I believe for us and scored 4 goals, and got 3 assists. However he can no longer play for us because his transfer agreement was signed and he is now playing for the AAA Jr 67s and because it is contact he cant play in our non-contact league. Let me tell you though, me and the starting goalie both noticed something in him, when he goes down on a full out breakaway, he doesn’t do much with the puck, he moves his body which throws you off way more. Keep an eye out for this kid to make an appearance in the OHL.

As well, I’m a sens fan and hate the Leafs, probably always will, but I love watching them now and I love how everyone gives 100%. More teams should implement the system Wilson has. Some players(Blake) need to work on not taking stupid penalties though, or in low scoring games the Leafs will get burned.

Also, regarding the goaltending situation in the NHL (I might focus a small section of each blog to this part), there is a huge problem, brutal teams have amazing goaltenders, so you dont really notice the skill, for example Vancouver, Columbus, LA, (labarbera is a good quality goalie), Atlanta. While talented teams have lower quality goalies or their stars are injured as in Ottawa(Gerber, Auld), New Jersey(Brodeur injury), Detroit(Osgood), Boston(Thomas, Fernandez), thats the reason some of the teams are not in playoff position, lack of a number 1 goalie. Look at some of the top teams, Montreal has Price, San Jose Nabokov, Buffalo Miller.

I’m going to finish my blog with a rumor. Supposedly Lehtonen is up for trade, because Atlanta wants Pavelec with them but want to keep Hedberg as a backup. Could Lehtonen and Kovalchuck be packaged to somewhere like New Jersey in exchange for picks and a young dman?