Hockey Season Around the Corner
Hockey is starting soon and it should be an interesting year. With all the changes on the teams and the salary cap it has made for an interesting summer. Managing a roster is now paramount to ensure team success. Changes may not be possible during the season due to the cap forcing teams to be more careful and leave some cap space. Teams can no longer afford to spend and then if something isn’t working just bring in more resources. Now it is a careful game of ensuring all the pieces fit within the cap, making it much more difficult to make changes.
I have been interested to watch and listen on the local media to all the rhetoric about how great the Vancouver Canucks will be this season. The Canucks have made massive changes from the coach to new forwards, some new defense and what has been the missing component for a long time, a top goalie. While the inclusion of Roberto Luongo should help Vancouver he has not won in the playoffs and has never lead the league such as Martin Brodeur, Eddie Belfour (in his prime), and Dominik Hasek. Each of these goalies has led the league and their teams to victory including winning the Stanley Cup. Well some may believe that Luongo never had a good supporting cast in Florida (I think the cast last year was quite good and getting better) the team in front of him in Vancouver is very different from last years entry and their will probably be an issue with team chemistry for the first part if not the majority of the season. Yes you can look at stats and say the players they lost were minus players and the players they added were all pluses last season but their is also team chemistry which goes way beyond individual stats. Luongo needs to lead the Canucks no matter how the team plays and he needs to steal victories on nights when the team does not show up. In the very tough Western Conference a team will not be able to take very many nights off or they will find themselves out of playoff contention very quickly.
As for my team the Calgary Flames the changes have been to help with the biggest shortfall last season lack of scoring. To add scoring the Flames did not have to kill team chemistry to add Alex Tanguay and Jeff Freisen should help Calgary score more goals. With the solid defense and most of the same forwards Calgary will again be in contention with of course Mikka Kiprusoff backstopping the team. Maybe even Tony Amonte will wake up and add to the goal production, if not I suspect GM Sutter will give him a Bus ticket out of town.
Having said all that Hockey is full of surprises and anything is possible. Should be an interesting season. Found this picture somewhere I thought it was quite well done, it is amazing what a little paint can do…..
and I haven’t forgotten about the so called “Center of the Universe” Toronto Maple Leafs, I just haven’t really heard much about them, much good that is….. 
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