EHM The Blue Line

The puck drops in SM-Liiga today!

Blues will play the raining champions, Kärpät in two hours and four minutes!

...

What was it I was supposed to say?

...

Well anyway, the puck drops today!!!

That's great, I'm jeaous that you'll have action back on the ice already. We have camps now but with the odd scheduling preseason actually begins this weekend. Usually there is a lot more 'camp' before the first game where they play another team so I wonder what those games will look like.

Go Espoo! (I have a bit of a problem with saying 'Go Blues' for obvious reasons) How does the team look this year?

Good luck all this season.

My Streatham team lost at home on opening night (something we didn't do all last season to another amateur team) and it was 0-4 so we can only improve. We lost our goalie to a rival, and our other goalie had his legs crushed at work We had to start with a 16 year old we were allowed to sign that week as an emergency. Not that that explains the shutout against.

Minstrel wrote:That's great, I'm jeaous that you'll have action back on the ice already. We have camps now but with the odd scheduling preseason actually begins this weekend. Usually there is a lot more 'camp' before the first game where they play another team so I wonder what those games will look like.

Go Espoo! (I have a bit of a problem with saying 'Go Blues' for obvious reasons) How does the team look this year?

Team looks good!

Jatkoaika.com ("overtime.com") - which is considered the no. 1 place in the internet for unofficial Finnish hockey knowledge - rated the team 3rd best in the league. Kärpät was first and Jokerit second.

Considering last year we were 11th and out of playoffs, the expectations are high for this year.

Raimo Summanen - who was Finland's head coach / GM in the World Cup of 2004, where we took the silver, loosing to Canada in the finals - is Blues' GM and has done really good job on building the team, while most other SM-Liiga teams have lost their players to NHL.

We have Steve Kariya, who was the leagues best scorer last season, Esa Pirnes a great Finnish forward, Jaakko Uhlbäck, best scorer of JYP last season and Tuomas Eskelinen an excellent defender from HPK. And while gaining all these great players we have lost only Lauri Tukonen to Kings. Even Ladislav Kohn remained with the team. Don MacLean on the other hand didn't, he was signed by... Detroit?

Looking real good!

hluraven wrote:Good luck all this season.

My Streatham team lost at home on opening night (something we didn't do all last season to another amateur team) and it was 0-4 so we can only improve. We lost our goalie to a rival, and our other goalie had his legs crushed at work We had to start with a 16 year old we were allowed to sign that week as an emergency. Not that that explains the shutout against.

Sad to hear about your goalie. How serious is it?

Tasku wrote:

hluraven wrote:Good luck all this season.

My Streatham team lost at home on opening night (something we didn't do all last season to another amateur team) and it was 0-4 so we can only improve. We lost our goalie to a rival, and our other goalie had his legs crushed at work We had to start with a 16 year old we were allowed to sign that week as an emergency. Not that that explains the shutout against.

Sad to hear about your goalie. How serious is it?

I don't think it's too drastic, he will recover fully AFAIK

The SEL starts at September 26. Although my team, the Frolunda Indians, aren't schduled to play until the day after. The opening game will be away against MoDo.

Russian Superleague is already started... more then week ago. First match I watched was Dynamo Moscow (champions) against MVD Tver (newcomers to the league). Very interesting game if you ask me, especially for the start of the season, with plenty of skating from side to side and millions of lost oppotunities from both teams. They were equal in regular time and in OT Nabokov scored the winner for Tver. What a kick for champs!
Two days ago watched Lokomotiv Yaroslavl (closest Superleague team to me, only 2 hours by train, so I consider it my home team) against CSKA Moscow... wow, that was a game! Suffice to say we won 5:4, made a comeback from 2:4 and finished 'em. I hope this season will be very interesting even without all this NHL'ers... btw, Datsiuk will stay in Russia, it seems.. not sure about Kovalchuk.

Alex.