Week of October 17, 2007, Issue #626
FRONT
In The Box
Dave Young and TB Player / inthebox@vueweekly.com
We’re into Week Three of this infant season and the crying, belching and burping has begun. We enjoyed the thrill of watching the Oilers lose three games: 2-0 to the Minnesota Wild on the road, 5-2 to Vancouver here at home and 4-1 to Vancouver out on the coast. Waaaah. TB and Dave try to leave three goals for and 10 goals against in three games behind. Piece of Cake.(NOT) Going The Distance Inter-Divisional games are the difference maker for NHL teams these days. The new “Eastern-teams-can-travel-less” or “rivalry-based” format with eight games against Divisional rivals means the Oilers have to beat Calgary, Colorado, Vancouver and Minnesota to gain ground in the standings. So far the Oilers are goose egg-for-three against the Wild and Canucks. There are 32 Northwest Division games. That leaves 29 more to learn to beat these four teams. Note: M-A Pouliot was the only current Oiler with a positive plus/minus rating (+1) in Divisional games last season. Shawn Horcoff was a –14 against Northwest teams. DY
Goats ... Go To Hell (or Springfield) Coach Craig MacT said he would be liberal with callups and demotions this season. The team has more players with two-way contracts than usual and an actual farm team of its own to pull them up/knock them down. Last week already saw Robert Nilsson and J-F Jacques sent to Springfield and Zack Stortini and glamour boy Robbie Schremp brought up. This year will be a produce or hop-on-a-different-plane-than-the-big-boys kind of year. DY
Good news/bad news Good news! The Oilers play the lowly Phoenix Coyotes Thursday night. A win over a team with no Sedins, Luongos or Gaboriks should be a tonic to a crappy losing streak. Bad news! The Coyotes have the same amount of wins as the Oilers with two. On paper, we’re no better than they are. Losing to Phoenix could take a lot of wind out of a lot of sails—just in time for Battle Of Alberta #1 on Saturday. DY
Fashion Nuggets Lately I’ve been thinking about logos. NHL team logos, that is. Maybe its because of the new RBK-designed NHL jerseys. Whatever the reason, I’ve been thinking about NHL logos. Some are time-tested classics: the proud bleu, blanc et rouge of the Habs, the old-timey feel of the Red Wings or Bruins, the classy Madison Avenue look of the Rangers’ shield, or the total political incorrectness of the Blackhawks brave. These have all been around forever and are branded into the psyche of North American hockey fans. Newer franchises, often trying to attract younger fans in non-traditional hockey markets, resort to cartoonish or gimmicky logos and nicknames (Yes, we’re looking at you, Mighty Cross-Promotion Ducks of Anaheim). Anyway, while I was ruminating about this, I noticed an interesting trend. I’ve always thought it odd that three of the six Canadian teams (Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver) used the letter C as the basis of their logo. That’s almost as odd as having two teams named the Rough Riders and the Roughriders. Other teams use the C as well.
Columbus has an easily identified C in their logo. The left half of the Carolina Hurricanes logo is a stylized C. And one could even argue that the avalanche of snow on the Colorado logo looks suspiciously like yet another C. Even more fun can be had in the archives. The Colorado Rockies (not the baseball team), the Cleveland Barons and the California Golden Seals all featured the letter C in their logos. But the all-time best usage of the letter C in an NHL logo has to be the old Canucks design. Not the Free Willy version or the enormous orange and yellow V, but the old-school rink-and-stick logo. It was so subtle that to this day many people don’t even realize the rink was a big C. So simple, so clean. No god-damn cartoons. One last note: Dave has pointed out that the Islanders logo also has a C. Or rather, a sea, surrounding the picture of Long Island. He’s such a nerd. TB
(Lemaire-coached) Sheep Go To Heaven On a similar note, it has struck me that the Minnesota Wild has to be the most ironically named team in hockey. Fucking boring hockey. But as long as they keep winning, I don’t expect that to change any time soon. TB