AJC > Sports Thrashers > Blog > Archives > 2007 > April > 14
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Injustice of Biblical proportions
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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After all, what kind of god would let a team play that hard and allow it to lose on a goal like that? It just makes you sick. It makes you question righteousness and piety and the ethic of hard work.
Of course, then I remember Job. And I think, perhaps this is a test. Perhaps this team just needs to keep playing hard, keep persevering and keep laying those rat bastards on their asses and keep putting the biscuit in the basket. (I don’t think the Bible put it quite like that, but it’s close enough.)
This team must be rewarded for its faith.
And now I shall handle serpents. Stand back. No, really. Farther.
OK, for real, guys. I could throw up. I could. I have never seen a team take it to another team like that and get absolutely nothing out of it. The Thrashers were dizzying with their speed and physical play, knocking bodies down left and right and never backing down from a challenge. The puck kept finding its way onto the Rangers’ sticks, kept bouncing in their favor — no more so than on a pinball goal off the sideboards from 90 feet.
Johan Hedberg played amazing. Amazing. A professional goalie. Unfortunately, so did Lundqvist, who made about four saves that require you to go frame-by-frame on the PVR to see just how he made them.
Even after the Avery goal, the Thrashers never relented. The players on this team have absolutely laid themselves out there. Even though our defensemen continue to make some hideous decsions — I’m talking to you Andy Sutton, Shane Hnidy and Nic Havelid — there isn’t a man on the bench who hasn’t fully commited to this experience.
So what’s going wrong? I think we need look no further than the power play, which is absoutely killing us in this series. One guy in my office suggested the Thrashers just start declining penalties, because their play at 5-on-5 is so superior to their power play. And that, my friends, falls on the shoulders of the coach. There’s too much talent on this team to not be able to diagram and teach an effective power play. We should be automatic with a man advantage, but something isn’t clicking.
What really bothers me is that we’re down 0-2 in this series despite both games being one-goal margins, and the second one being a game that we absolutely dominated. And yet, the smarmy ‘experts’ in the national media will simply write it as being a poor showing from a Southeast Division team, a laughing stock from Atlanta. That’s what bothers me, because this team played as fine a hockey game as you could hope to see in Game 2.
Now the task gets taller than, oh, say, something really tall. A tree. Or a building. Taller than that. A big building. We go to the Garden for two games we must have. It’ll be a zoo. It’ll be terrifying. It’ll be great.
Over? Did you say over? Nothing’s over until we say it is.
So, remember Job, my friends. He scraped Satan’s boils from his skin
Keep the faith, boys.
p.s., if any of you noticed that Scott Mellanby’s name was printed as “Craig Mellanby” in a photo caption in Saturday’s sports section …. a big mea culpa on my part. I wrote it. My only explanation was that I meshed “Scott Mellanby” and “Craig Berube” into one person in one of those inexplicable senior moments. So, no nasty e-mails to Custance. He had nothing to do with it.
