Bruins Beat: All Star Shenanigans

To continue this small Bruins blog I'd like to take a moment and discuss some of the recent events that involved the NHL, more specifically the NHL All star game. This year, the NHL allowed fans to vote for one captain from each division and an additional 10 players from each division who would then be broken into small 3 man teams to compete during the weekend. Now as soon as I heard that fans would be allowed to vote for all the players and the captains I knew that something screwy was going to happen because putting the power in the Internets hands is almost never a good idea. To confirm my suspicions, the winner of this years pacific division All Star captaincy ended up being the one and only John Scott of the Arizona Coyotes. Scott is almost exactly the opposite of the type of player that should be allowed to compete during All Star weekend, a 7 foot tall goon who has a total of 11 points and over 500 penalty minutes in his career. Most other players that were voted in have more points in the first half of their season than Scott does in his career and yet Scott overwhelmingly won the captains vote for the Pacific Division due to the fact that he was the oddball and trolls everywhere decided they wanted to ruin what little credibility this event had, if it even had any to begin with. The major problem I have with his selection is that it also deprives the Coyotes of having a real representative at the All Star game, instead being forced to send Scott in place of a more deserving player like Oliver Ekman-Larsson.
The league tried to override this decision which would have been happy with if they didn't try to do so in the most shady and underhanded way. To summarize, the NHL basically orchestrated a trade where the Coyotes sent Scott and another prospect to Montreal in return for a middle of the road defensive prospect. Montreal was then instructed to send Scott down to the AHL in order to make him ineligible for the All Star game. Unfortunately for the league both the media and fans were outraged at how the league handled this situation and in the face of losing many viewers to a boycott the league decided to allow Scott to represent the Pacific Division anyway. I am both happy and sad at the outcome of this, for although I don't believe Scott belongs in the All Star game he definitely does not deserve to be booted out in such a manner. Overall, this whole situation makes me sad as it shows that the fans really don't care about the All Star game at all and would rather ruin the credibility of being selected to the All Star team in order to send a goon to skate around and get embarrassed by real All Stars.

Bruins Beat: The Skids

Hello boys and girls, welcome back to another installment of Bruins Beat. It has been exactly three weeks since my last post as I took a break for the holidays. It was nice to not have to worry about any school work for a couple weeks, but I am glad to be back and analyzing what has proven to be a very interesting Bruins season thus far. Since my last post the Bruins have played a grand total of eight games and have a record of 3-5-0 in those eight games. In this post I don't plan on recapping every one of these eight games as I just do not have the time nor the memory to accurately describe the events that occurred during each game of these last 3 weeks. There is one game in particular that I would like to talk about and that would be the Winter Classic, which I had the overwhelming pleasure of attending this year, my second Winter Classic I have attended. Unfortunately, this year my experience with the Classic was overall a negative one.
There were many things the NHL did right this time around with the Winter Classic, first of all being the choice of match up. With no disrespect to the Redsox/Yankees or the Lakers/Celtics rivalries, the Bruins/Canadiens has to be the most electrifying rivalry in all of North America. Between the almost 100 years of history the teams share to the countless scraps and playoff match ups that have culminated in all out brawls on the ice, there really is nothing like a game between Boston and Montreal and that was something I could feel as soon as I walked into Patriot Place. Due to the relatively small distance between Boston and Montreal, there was a good amount of Montreal fans on site for this game, which of course riles up the fans of both teams. There's a tension in the air at the games between these two teams that builds and builds the more rowdy and fanatic the fans of each team are, and on the day of the Winter Classic that tension hung in the air like smoke from the many tailgate parties going on in the parking lot. The choice of venue was also pretty damn perfect as well. Gillette is large enough to host an insane amount of fans of both teams, yet small enough that there were very few bad site lines in the place. I myself sat about halfway up in the balcony and was able to see everything that happened on the ice. The pregame events and team introductions were nothing short of phenomenal, as well as the flyover which I have posted a video of down below (video credited to YouTube user David West). I myself was literally shaking by the time Ozzy Osbourne's crazy train played over the speakers to signal the drop of the puck.

It is about here that the positives of the experience begin to fade and the negatives set in. One of the more minor negatives were the choice of music performances between intermission. The NHL decided that it would be a good idea to book two artists to perform in between each period, which is a great idea as there really isn't much else to do other than wait in the gigantic line to use the bathroom. Unfortunately, NBC chose to invite two of the worst acts I have ever seen in Nate Ruess (lead singer for FUN) and Simple Plan. These two artists could not have been further removed from the atmosphere of the games. Instead of having an exciting local talent perform, say the Dropkick Murphys, NBC decided to choose an annoyingly falsetto alt rock singer as well as a pop punk band that peaked in popularity around the time I was born. It goes without saying that I and many of the other fans around me were not impressed with the acts and I really hope NBC chooses more relatable talent in the future. Finally, and most unfortunately, the most upsetting thing about the whole event had to have been the abysmal hockey that myself and 68,000 other fans had to watch. The Bruins got completely embarrassed on the ice in a 5-1 defeat that saw them play their worst hockey of the season at the worst possible time. The tone of the game was set early on as Montreal scored just over one minute into the first period, a period that saw the Bruins get out shot 14-3. While it may be true that the Bruins were missing key players in David Krejci and Brad Marchand, the overall lack of effort and inability to complete passes and overall just play the game cannot be blamed solely on the Bruins bad luck with injuries and suspensions. Overall, I would have to say I had fun at the Classic but there is just no denying how long, cold, and defeated the walk was back to my car at the end of the game.