Miikka Kiprusoff’s great-year-wasted just got a little worse. After spending six months being let down by his under-achieving teammates, now Kipper finds out their indifferent play in front of him not only cost him a trip to the playoffs, but a Vezina nomination, too. 
The NHL announced its three finalists for the Vezina Trophy yesterday – and Kipper wasn’t among them. The voters cast their nods in the direction of Martin Brodeur, Ryan Miller and Ilya Bryzgalov.
We won’t know until after the NHL hands out its awards in June just where Miikka ranked in the voting, but given the Vezina-worthy season he [...]

OK, finally coming out of my mourning period. I think we can now talk openly about the untimely death of the Calgary Flames.
This week, the Flames have died the way they lived. Without nearly enough scoring. Unable to win at home. Showing only enough energy, determination and skill to stay close, not enough to win. With little sense of character or focus. With a goalie doing everything he could to bail out his team, putting in a Vezina-worthy season, but with most of the rest of the team playing well below their potential. With the captain and superstar utterly unable [...]

Gotta thank Dave Thomas (aka SundevilD) for not only slipping a Ringo reference into his last post, but also reminding me of a time when we loved the Flames so completely and utterly that we would commit a break-and-enter at the old Stampede Corral and then hide out in its various dark corners for three or four hours just so we could see them in the playoffs. (For the record, it was Game 6, quarter-finals, vs. the Flyers, 1981. The game was electric, Flames lost in a thriller, then dumped the Flyers back at the old Spectrum in Game 7.)
That [...]

Wow… how bad are the Flames this December? Just terrible, after coming out of November looking like one of the teams to beat, they have proven to me, and fellow Calgarians that this is probably another early playoff exit team. In December they have won 3 games and lost 6. They need a Christmas break like Gary Bettman needs a heart attack. They have looked very uninterested in winning since December began. In November their problem was that they would play hard for all but 5-10 mins of the game, and in that time they would give up a few [...]

Well…we won, it was not pretty but we got the job done. But lets be completely honest if you aren’t beating the Maple Leafs this year, unless you are Carolina, you better be hanging your head in shame. I say the best team in the AHL right now, Rochester Americans, could give the Maple Leafs a run for their money. “The Monster”, Jonas Gustavsson, was a siv with a 0.400 save percentage, the only person chasing that number is Joe Mauer of the Minnesota Twins…wow. In all fairness though I would say the only period we outplayed the leafs was the third, and [...]