Nashville Predators vs. Canucks || October, 20th, 2011

Mr. Dale Weise!  Player of the Game, Man of the Match or however you want to tag it.  Every time he was on the ice, he tried to make a difference.  It's times like this that makes you remember why Gillis (or was it Steve Tambellini) won the GM of the Year award.  Well, it was only one game, but it was a good one for Weise.

Along with a number of other Canucks: the Sedins, Higgins, Kesler, Volpatti stepped up and took a couple on the chin from Tootoo.  Now, coming off of a pretty bad loss to New York, Luongo had to step it up.  I guarantee that there were about 234,000 people jumping up and demanding Lou's head on a platter the second Halischuk got that funny bouncer off the boards, past Luongo.  Before you give yourself a hernia because of the table you tried to flip in Hulk like fashion, relax.  That probably would have beat 70% of the other goalies in the league.  Yes, that goal sucked.  Yes, he shouldn't have been out that far to play a puck off the boards.  He did shut the door after that, which is something that the Predators Pekka Rinne couldn't seem to do.

Rinne had four pretty unfortunate bounces.  Daniel Sedin bounces one off of his back, Kline tips it in his own net from a Henrik shot from the point, Weise gets a his first career NHL goal off a phenomenal tip, although I'm not sure if he could do that again if he had 100 tries. Higgins goal was a fluke that his original pass across on a 2-on-1 break out, came right back to him and Rinne already commited to the pass.  The only real legitimate goal was Kesler's, who picked far top corner on a sharp angle one-timer.  Even Sturm should have had a goal, I still don't think it was kicked in, but I've come to expect the call going against us every time the refs make a call to Toronto (you rat bastards).  It just wasn't Rinne's night.  Now if all of this happened to Luongo, we (including me...probably) would be demanding that Luongo be traded, somehow, and we get a restraining order for him to never come back to Vancouver.  Let's not forget, the Canucks got to game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals despite only scoring 8 goals in the final round.  There's a reason that happened.

Lindback came in to replace Rinne after 20 minutes and seemed to fair pretty well.  Now Nashville isn't in the same goalie situation Vancouver is in, but it was a promising look for Predator fans to see a decent back up in case their pride jewel gets hurt or something.  Speaking of which!  Shea Weber was in danger of getting a suspension on his hit from behind on Jannik Hansen.  I think his $2500 fine was a little light, considering his massive salary he's making this year.  It was probably his lack of suspension history that saved him, but still, the punishment didn't really seem to fit the crime.  Do you get the feeling that these suspensions are being judged on whether or not the player gets hurt or not?  Shouldn't you punish the action and not the result?  Hypothetically, if I were playing and I got in a fight and decided to take my skate off and use it as a weapon, shouldn't I be suspended on the fact that I took it off and started wielding a CCM knife, rather than it being judged on if I connected or not.  Is that just me?

Canucks started out exactly like they did against the Rangers, except the bounces went their way.  Things are starting to look a little better, game by game, period by period, shift by shift.  Did I miss any of the cliche answers?