that while I’m NOT on the “Fire Andy Murray” bandwagon, I’ve always felt that when the Blues do take that next step that everyone expected them to take coming into this season, it wouldn’t be with Murray behind the bench. Who then, you ask? I don’t know, but sometimes a change for chage’s sake can be good (not so much for SBN, though). It can shake up a team and make them look at theirselves harder, hopefully pulling themselves out of their respective funks. Again, I’m not calling for Murray’s head. Yet.

Now that I’ve proven an opposing viewpoint, I’ll say why I voted for the first choice. In most of the games so far, we’ve been flat, listless, or straight up not concentrating on the little things enough (I’m looking at you, TechnoViking!). In the Fuck Detroit games we started out that way, but after the forewards started hustling, fought along the boards, got to loose pucks, etc. we were able to pull those games out. Since we’ve gotten back, most of our games have seen us play the way we did to start the Sweeden games for as much as 40-55 minutes. The goaltending’s been great most of the time, as had the defense (again, mostly), but that energy comes from the forewards doing the little things defensively, on the forecheck, et al. A perfect example of how that could change a game is Oshie’s play towards the end of last year. There were at least 2-3 nights off-hand where the team was flat and getting beat, if not on the scoreboard. Then Oshie would do his thing, for a shift or two and everyone else would try and match that, and low and behold, we’d come away with two points! He wouldn’t even have to get on the scoresheet to be the most influencial player on the ice!

Hopefully either A) Eller could start providing that, or B) Yoshie could take a break from counting how many 74s are in the crowd and not worry so much about keeping his tips frosted to do half of what it was that made us give a fuck about him to begin with. It’s started to turn around, but it needs to start happening for 60 minutes, as opposed to 53 and give up, like on Sunday.

Also, I don’t want to go on a Brewer-hating rant, but it looks like we’re starting to play like our captain – slow and disinterested in the affairs of human hockey. They need to go back to playing like our de-facto captain from last year: hungry. [Walt fat pun partially intended.]