Saturday, October 4, 2008

flames opening night roster: gettin' closer

no real surprises out of the flames front office today, as daz announces three more cuts, trimming the roster to a near-manageable 26. mikael backlund will return to västerås for the year, after a tough training camp that seemed to break his confidence somewhat. hopefully he can turn it around and come back next summer with avengeance.... the quad cities got two more players today as well; the new starting goaltender matt keetley, and first year pro and recent winner of the tomi mäki award, john armstrong.

the flames are still currently carrying 15 forwards and 9 defensemen, and are presumably only planning to cut two more of each. two of eriksson, warrener, & pardy will go, and two of nystrom, lundmark, or prust. i would think the team has enough problems with cap space without carrying more than one additional player at each forward and defense, and i'm guessing those pressbox guys will be andre roy and either pardy or warrener....

this, of course, said under the assumption that bootuzzi will be healthy enough to go on wednesday in vancouver... which i hope he is, since he'll be enemy #1, to be sure.

i suppose that means the lineup will probably look a little like this:

bertuzzi/bourque - langkow - iginla
cammalleri - lombardi - boyd
glenX - conroy - moss
nystrom/lundmark - primeau - roy/prust

could be better, could be worse. i AM excited that cammalleri looks to be slotted in with lombo, no matter what other combinations come up in the keenan line blender. i'm just hoping the hip ailment sidelining #13 is minor in nature...

i spent the day watching the pittsburgh - ottawa game, played in stockholm's globe arena. my hate for alfredsson softened juuust a little, watching him belt out the swedish national anthem, and watching godard take the most asinine hooking penalty for another team made me grin a bit..... also, i'll say it and i'll say it with a grin: jordan staal= 1 point. sidney crosby = 1.... and aside from not realizing the earliness of gametime (thereby leaving dubinsky on the bench), the screaming dobermans had a pretty good day. :)

4 comments:

awildermode said...

did not know you hated alfredson. i though you (like me) like all the swedes...except eriksson

walkinvisible said...

nope !

alfredsson is (was?) a loob denyer, and also guaranteed a cup win for ottawa a few years back. i cannot support anyone with that kind of hubris....

Anonymous said...

I'm going to call anyone I dislike a "Loob deny-er" from here on in.

Say, you think there's any way I could get a little more profile on this blog?

Kent W. said...

I think you lucked out with that Staal pick - he played with Malkin yesterday and might be there all year.

How about Martin Gerber? He looked positively Kiprusoff-esque.