Ding Dong Bourque Is Gone!

On Jaunary 12, 2012, my smile was just a tad bit brighter as I floated along the Caribbean.  That was an awesome day.  The Calgary Flames lost a bit of height and a lot of dead weight that day and I lost a huge source of my frustration.  If you haven’t figured this out by now, you clearly haven’t grasped my extreme dislike for one Rene Bourque.

The Montreal Canadiens and the Calgary Flames did a little midseason trade, with Rene Bourque heading to Montreal in return for Mike Cammalleri.  This marks the return of two seasons.  The last time Cammalleri was on the team was the 2008-2009 season where he played 81 games and racked up 39 goals, a career best.  Looking to repeat that success, Cammalleri has replaced my second least favorite player in the NHL (number one being Jagr).

As a Flame, Bourque had a career high of 27 goals.  While Bourque was expected to be a 30 goal scorer a season, and he was fairly close twice, he never really lived up to the expectation Calgary had for him.

I missed the debut of Mike Cammalleri against the LA Kings, in which Cammalleri had the only goal, however I did manage to catch his triumphant goal last night as he scored the winning goal in the shoot out in the Flames trip to LA.  While Bourque has a slightly better track record in shoot outs (Bourque making 1 of 4, Cammalleri making 1 of 5) there’s something about Cammalleri that makes me want to put the fate of two points in his hands over Bourque.

As my friend Pat said as I was struggling to write this after so many days have passed “Bork is gone, no one cried, good riddance muppet” Which is pretty much how I feel.  Bourque over stayed his welcome in Calgary, not producing enough and was eating up a large chunk of the cap that the Flames can’t afford to waste.

So I know it’s a few days late, I know it’s brief (wicked bad headache that’s making it hard to care about more than crawling into bed, sorry), but I had to put my two cents in.