It is the rite of spring in Canada. Our news and public interest is dominated by one thing – hockey. Hockey defines a large aspect of Canadian culture. There are, of course, many other nations who play hockey, but I don’t know that any other nation is so dominated by hockey culturally.<\/p>\n
Well, this year, Hockey Night in Canada<\/a> has a feature <\/a>on-line where you can pick a set of players (two forward lines, three defenseman, and a goalie) and gain ‘points’ as ‘your’ players shoot, score, win, and lose points when they take penalties or lose a game. The position of goaltender is huge. Wide point swings come by a win or a loss.<\/p>\n I played this game for the two segments in the regular season and failed abysmally. After the first round of the playoffs, I am sitting pretty… somewhere between 700th and 800th out of over 20,000 players. My playoff strategy has been to pick players primarily from one of two teams, especially the goalie I think will win one of the matchups. I was fortunate in having the Vancouver Canucks [known around our house as the Canuckleheads or Can-yuchhs] win their series. They nearly lost after going ahead 3-1 in games, having to win at home in the seventh game to move on.<\/p>\n The other side of my ticket, besides several Canuckleheads came from Tampa Bay and Nashville, both eliminated in the first round. The players I used were big point producers (Lecavallier and St. Louis, etc), but their teams didn’t advance. I had to replace all of these players and went mostly with Ottawa Senators. I am sticking with the Canucks for this round as well, but I am on thin ice with my picks. The two teams I am mainly supporting are receiving indifferent support from the experts, especially Vancouver. No one is picking Vancouver to win, and the opinion on Ottawa is evenly divided, I think.<\/p>\n I picked Vancouver because over the course of the season we get the most exposure to them and because they [and their goalie, Roberto Luongo] have had such an impressive run since Christmas. In that stretch, I think the Canucks lost only 5 or 6 games outright. Their opponent for this round, the Anaheim Ducks, have two towers on defense, and had an impressive start, but seemed to fade through the stretch. I am hoping that my gamble on the Canucks pays off, otherwise I am toast in the HNIC game.<\/p>\n Regards, It is the rite of spring in Canada. Our news and public interest is dominated by one thing – hockey. Hockey defines a large aspect of Canadian culture. There are, of course, many other nations who play hockey, but I don’t know that any other nation is so dominated by hockey culturally. Well, this year, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-6V","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"