Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Wednesday notes

By now most folks have heard this elsewhere, but if you haven't: Medicine Hat Tigers coach/GM Willie Desjardins will be named the head coach of Canada's World Junior team for next season. Excellent choice IMO....Desjardins has been putting consistently good, winning, entertaining teams on the ice in the Hat for six or seven years now. 

He also has a lot of familiarity with the rink and the city of Saskatoon (where Canada will play all its games) since he is an alumnus of the University of Saskatchewan and also was an assistant coach with the Blades for a while, although I don't know how much of an advantage that truly is at this tournament. Probably not much.

To the NHL, it's going to be an exciting two days today and tomorrow since three of the four 2nd round series are going to game sevens. Washington-Pittsburgh goes tonight, and if you haven't been watching this series then you're missing some really entertaining hockey. Boston-Carolina and Detroit-Anaheim play their game 7s tomorrow night. 

Think about this scenario for a second - if Pittsburgh, Carolina, and Anaheim win those game 7's, then the top three seeds in both conferences will all be out by the 2nd round. It kind of makes the regular season seem a lot less important when the top seeds can be knocked off so early in the playoffs, doesn't it. It certainly helps make the case that parity is very strong in the NHL when the "weak" teams can so easily test and even beat the "strong" teams.

Coming later today - the deadline for signing 2007 NHL picks is approaching. I'm putting together a list of signed and unsigned WHLers in that draft....

1 comment:

KBF said...
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