AJC > Sports Thrashers > Blog > Archives > 2008 > March > 24
Monday, March 24, 2008
Now, About Friday Night…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
OK, the blog party is over…time to get back at it. Everyone please make sure to clean up after themselves so that the maid and janitor don’t bill me for overtime…Sara, as always, the brownies were great. But after eating a couple of them I had the strange urge to put on some Pink Floyd and contemplate the similarities between the solar system/galaxy make-up and atom/molecular structuring. Strange, huh? Five_Hole, awesome job with tunes selections and the requests were great too … Oh, and Smoothie, you can take the lampshade off your head now.
Now, there is this little matter regarding last Friday’s game. You remember that, don’t you…or did you erase its memory by way of mass consumption of adult beverages? If that’s the case, you may want to have another shot of Alka-Seltzer nearby ‘cuz believe me brothah… it wasn’t pretty!
Everything started out well enough…there was a goodly-sized crowd on hand, 18,562 was the official number and most were actually in attendance. The Thrashers played well early on against a Capital team still scrapping for its playoff life. Atlanta was being outshot, albeit not by an ungodly amount, through the first period and a half. The home team had taken a 1-0 deficit and turned it into a 3-1 lead thanks in part to a Tobias Enstrom slapper on the….POWER PLAY!!! …(sigh)…Anyway, Jimmy Slater then followed it up with two breakaway style goals…one of the shorthanded variety and both set up wonderfully by feeds from Eric Perrin.
The boys in blue left the ice for the second intermission to applause and cheers from the assembled masses. They were up by two and playing well…check that…very well. Kari had stopped 21 of 22 shots and looked sharp doing so. The crowd was into it…oh, they knew the team was in the twilight of an unmitigated disaster of a season, but for this night they were being treated to a well-played, exciting game. All was right with the world.
Until…
Once again, they just HAD to play the third period, didn’t they? For twenty minutes Washington appeared to be on a perpetual man advantage and seemed eligible to file for Homestead Exemption in the Thrashers’ zone. There was more rubber flying around Kari’s goal than at a Goodyear tire plant. With the amount of shots he faced in the third period alone, Lehtonen must have felt like a pedestrian crossing the street in downtown Detroit!
Indeed, Kari now knows what it’s like to be Dick Cheney’s guest on a hunting trip, (see, I can be fair and balanced).
To his credit, the Finnish keeper held his own for as long as he could, but Alexander The Great finally broke through 11:30 into the third. Then Nicklas Backstrom crumpled twine at the 16:00 mark… 32 seconds later, he gave the Caps the lead.
When it was all over, Washington had outshot the Thrashers 23-2 for the period, (most coming from close range)…45-18 for the game, beaten Atlanta 5-3 and had pulled to within a single point of the eighth and final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference.
The masses of Blueland then watched as a team “moving in the right direction” skated off the ice…into the visitor’s locker room!
Now, this is normally the part of the program where I would go off into a rant laced with symbolic profanity and dipped in sarcasm. But, in all honesty, I think Kari Lehtonen’s reaction to Backstrom’s goal…the one which completed Washington’s come-from-behind effort… was the perfect display of the emotion all of us felt. It was he that was left out there to suffer the slings and arrows of the onslaught. Kari could have sued his defense for lack of support and his reaction said it all, as did his post-game response when he likened the way the team played in the third as “horse [excrement]”.
Moreover, honesty compels me to say that, from my vantage point, there really is no shock, no surprise, and no incredulity to what went down Friday night in Blueland. This is what we have come to expect this season from the Don Waddell designed, engineered, constructed, general managed and coached Atlanta Thrashers.
(sigh)…I think I’ll have that Alka-Seltzer myself.
