Stop with the excuses.

“It hits our freaking shin pad and bounces in our net. That’s just the way things are going for us.” -- John Anderson, AJC, 12/3/08

Come on. That happened 5 times? We played balls-to-the-wall hockey for 60 minutes and were victims of weird bounces? NO. We played craptastic hockey all night. We allowed the Pizza Line to walk all over us by not covering all three of them (2 on Spezza and 2 on Alfredsson leaves one on Heatley - and that one wasn't paying attention). We have no concept of defensive coverage at all. We couldn't score on six powerplays, including a five-on-three that should have been a gimmie. Auld isn't the second coming of Brodeur. We had a better goalie in net last night who should have had about 2 of those goals covered.

Anderson's system works - he's never had a losing season as a coach. But it's hard to get a system to work when you get a team who is lazy ("fragile," as DW calls them) and a team who gets one loss and goes all emo about it, leading to 5 game losing streaks. On the flip side, we beat the SHIT out of Toronto, and no one carries that over to the hotel let alone the next game. What is this? They know Anderon's offensive system works. It got us a 5 game winning streak when we TRY. But when we shut down and no one bothers to do anything save for the Little White Russian line (and yes, Kovy, I'm looking at you - I know you're frustrated, but sweetie - when you shoot, aim for the net), we're craptastic.

Our three goalies are suffering horribly... Pav's stats are looking as bad as Kari's, and Moose is back at .500 (which is better than the other two can say). Our superstar's going to go fetal one of these days on center ice. We are alone in last place. And we have no one to blame but ourselves.


On the Blues end, we allowed 4 goals from the Wild - looks like Mason's hot streak is over. I'm not sure if we have 2 starters or 2 journeymen or what, but our goalie situation needs to be examined. I'm not going to complain about the offense, because the Wild have a D like a brick wall (that Colorado game was a fluke). But allowing them to score 4 goals? Not kosher.