Sometimes you run into a hot goaltender. Some other notes to wrap this one up:
- The Coyotes played a close to perfect road game: get a lead, get good goaltending, take the home crowd out of it. Check, check, check.
- The long, tape-to-tape passes made by both Erik Johnson and Alex Pietrangelo made for some great chances. As this team progresses and the talent gets more seasoned, there are some serious highlight reel plays coming our way. Chucklehead behind me and his, "Johnson sucks tonight," comments be damned.
- Speaking of fan comments, angriest one of the night from some woman behind me when a Coyotes' player fell down near a face-off scrum: "Step on his goddamn hand!"
- Weirdest fan comment of the night, yelled out as the Blues carried the puck into the offensive zone while on the penalty kill: "OK, now let's set it up!" To which the guy in front of me commented, "Set what up? That's pretty optimistic."
- I'm still getting my head around the concept of the Coyotes being a good team, but here they are, a good team. Bryzgalov is certainly a big part of that, but they have some talented youngsters and a nice enough mix of veterans to be dangerous.
- Did you hear? Eric Brewer suited up tonight! The Robot's 18 minutes were mostly solid and yet, people were openly yelling at him already. I don't know if anyone has gotten less of a break from fans in the history of this team. The only way management could get the heat off of him would be to bring back Mike Danton for a second stint. And that guy would probably have a better chance of spinning, "I tried to have a guy killed" into a positive faster than Brewer could ever turn "I never said I was going to replace Chris Pronger" into some sort of support.
- The Coyotes' scouting report on Ty Conklin clearly was to shoot far post. The less said about this is probably best.
- Panthers are here on Saturday, and as far as I can tell, they still suck, so here's hoping for a win at home. Because I'm getting awfully tired of watching losing efforts in person.
Here are your post-game interviews. Brewer smashes his all-time record for words uttered at one time and Conklin seems to have shaved the beard he was working on. Um, someone help out the new guy: teams Fear The Beard. Time to start the re-grow.
If you want to see my take on the team's struggles this October, be sure to check back in tomorrow. Go Blues.