Jose and the Pussycats

You're not as scary as you think you are, Caps.

Now that's what I call a rebound game.

Following a game where even our otherwise rock solid goaltending looked weak, the Sabres put together perhaps their most complete effort of the season to shut out a talent-heavy team looking for their seventh straight win. The offense was creating and capitalizing, the defense was all over the ice, and Ryan Miller was the Ryan Miller we've come to expect him to be. As always it's impossible to tell if this version of the Sabres is going to stick around, but if ever we needed them to show up, it was after Monday night's ugly loss. It feels good to feel good about this team again, if only for a little while.

I'm not sure if this was entirely the Sabres doing or not, but Washington's best players were totally invisible last night. I literally just had to google Alex Semin to make sure that he wasn't injured, because I don't remember hearing his name a single time last night. Of course Ovie was talked about a lot (when is he ever not?), but he never really got anything going offensively. In fact, most of the replays he was involved in showed a good move made by a Sabre to defend him. In any case, the Caps never made me feel any kind of doom, impending or otherwise, despite having been led to believe that I should be shaking in my boots.

Of course, no Ovechkin replay sticks out more prominently in my mind than the one showing him taking a dive on a trip by none other than Derek Roy. I sure won't be forgetting that irony in a hurry. I'm disappointed that there's no clip to be found of it yet, because I so wanted to post it (not to mention watch it over and over and over). But in my search I found this:



It's quite similar, in that the trip is just as blatant, the embellishment just as obvious, and the broadcast team (though thankfully not the officials) just as oblivious. On second thought, maybe I won't be watching it over and over and over. The icky pirouette combined with the announcers' unjustifiable indignation is making me feel a little bit like looking for the fucking phone.

To close on a happier thought, seeing everyone on the ice tower over Nathan Gerbe made me think of this:



I'm glad the game didn't end up going south, but if it had, I would have greatly enjoyed posting a picture of Gerbe with the excuse: "I do not, for one, think that the problem was that the team was down. I think that the problem may have been that there was a "hockey player" on the ice that was in danger of being crushed by Derek Roy!" Maybe I'll put that extrapolated moment of happiness behind breakable glass for a future emergency.