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Oleg Petrov

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Everything posted by Oleg Petrov

  1. Grabovski signs with the Islanders, 4 years, $5 million per. Take that, Oilers!
  2. RDS (and here) has Pyatt at $500K, which doesn't seem right to me. He was given a qualifying offer, and if he was $685K last year (I thought that was the case), doesn't his qualifying offer have to include a minimum raise? I feel like if they wanted to sign him at $500K, they would have had to not offer him a qualifying offer, wait until July 1, and sign him as a free agent (like they did with Kilger a few years ago).
  3. It's lunacy if Lapierre doesn't make this team. I hope Carbo is just trying to light a little flame under his egglayer.
  4. I was totally expecting Murray to be in waiverville coming into camp, but nobody beat him out of his spot, and he brought his boxing gloves. Also, like others have said here, it's important to remember that his spot is effectively the healthy scratch spot - a spot that should not be considered for a good young player in development. You park someone there who has occasional usefulness (slotted into the lineup when an upcoming game calls for a bodyguard who can kill the occasional penalty) and who doesn't depreciate by being on the shelf. D'Agostini or SKostitsyn would rot there, waiting for an injury to happen - which they can do from Hamilton anyway. Neither Grabovski nor Chipchura are competing with him, because if they aren't going to play, they need to be sent down, not eat Garth's hot dogs in the press box. I don't even think he's really the 13th forward, either. Should one of the starting 12 forwards get injured, watch for Streit to be moved up and one of the two backup D slotted in to replace him in the back. Carbo's looking for any excuse to dress 6.5 defencemen, particularly when two of his potential policemen (Komi and O'Byrne) are d-men and may be in the box for 5 minutes. So Murray is locked in the pressbox...and if he's able to bring his 05-06 form off the bench for the 36 games he does play, all the better.
  5. Both he and Bouillon had horrible years last year, but I expect Bouillon to rebound this season. Brisebois has the edge on him of being an equivalent player at half the pay; O'Byrne has the edge of being a hitter on a team that's short on size at D. I think his only real asset is that he plays on the side where the Canadiens are understaffed (if I'm not mistaken). I'm hoping BG can slip him and his 1.7 contract to some unsuspecting GM before Carbo has to cut him.
  6. Jaroslav Halak has a mohawk. Josh Gorges also has a new haircut. Tom Kostopoulos speaks decent French, to everyone's shock. Huet says the new Reebok material felt good in the all-star game. Koivu clarifies that he doesn't actually think the Habs can't win the cup. And that, folks, was enough to cover three full pages of La Presse. I think this entire city needs training camp to start a week ago.
  7. An impression based on watching his on-bench behaviour (on tv, admittedly), second-degree hearsay, and my imagination. Everything I've heard and observed about Koivu is that he is not a particularly glad-handed sort - I remember a couple of years ago when he had Bulis on his wing for a little while, Koivu had made a nice play to set up the speedy Jan Bulis for one of Bulis' trademarked wildly-errant shots, missing an open net. Koivu was back on the bench first, and as Bulis made his way to the gate, the camera caught Koivu look Bulis in the eyes, purse his lips, and shake his head slightly in disgust. Reports I've heard that he is just not a nice guy (which is different from saying he's not a good person - his yeoman charity work is testimony to that) coalesce with what I've seen of him on the ice. That's certainly not my style - when a teammate messes up the way Bulis did, I clap them on the back and tell them they'll get it next time, or that it was a good effort. But I acknowledge that when you've lost season after season to knee injuries, battled cancer and won, and had your eye poked out and come back with a career season, that you can pull off that style of leadership and make it work for you. When Koivu reacts to your mistakes like that - by showing how little he thinks of you - you want to be better. And, to follow on the point I was making in the earlier post, it makes your teammates a lot less worried about treading on your tender feet.
  8. As sad as I am to see the Hammer go, I can't help thinking that the departure of his and Rivet's much-vaunted leadership is a good thing. I don't deny Souray had it, but I think that as long as he and Rivet were there, the leaders of the future would feel out of place standing up. One of the qualities that makes a good in-room leader is the ability to sense your team-mates' moods and know how your actions and words will manipulate them to be better - ultimately, and I know this sounds mooshy, a good leader is someone who combines sensitivity with charisma. So a good leader of the future may have been sitting in the room last season, staying quiet for two reasons: knowing how much Rivet perceived himself as central to the team and how important that was to Rivet (witness his out-of-proportion reaction to being benched...once), and knowing that Souray's undeniable charisma would likely turn to bitterness at the first hint of trespass on his big-brother image. Koivu's weird brand of leadership has no fear of rivalry, because it's blended with some kind of surly contempt for his teammates. A leader of the future doesn't need to worry about treading on Koivu's toes the way he did with Souray and Rivet. So while some bemoan the loss of these two leaders, I'm relieved that space has been opened up for new leaders to grow into their roles and, dare I say, do a better job of it.
  9. I was a real big Ribeiro fan...at least a big 2003-04 Ribeiro fan. It wasn't just that he led the team in scoring that year, or that he made Pierre Dagenais a goal-scoring threat, it was that he was so exciting to watch - he was doing stuff that nobody had ever done before, a kind of a hockey genius. The Niinimaa trade was disappointing because I saw the 2003-04 Ribeiro disappear and what turned out to be a mediocre defenseman take his place. I felt Ribeiro was more valuable than that. But even when he was on fire in 2003-04, the rest of the NHL didn't take much notice of him (except as a player who supposedly feigned an injury in the playoffs - thanks, Don Cherry), and when Gainey decided he needed to move him last September, it was the post-lockout, speed-encumbered Ribeiro that he had to trade, not the one I had appreciated a few years before. The Dallas GM may have realized Ribeiro's value, but if no one else was interested in him, there was no need to pay a fair price. Plekanec had shown flashes of brilliance in 05-06, and needed Ribeiro's spot; Ribeiro needed to be gone; and Gainey needed a defenseman who wasn't Patrick Traverse. In sum, it probably hurt to have to eat some of Ribeiro's just trade value, but the trade was better made than unmade, even if the other GM won big (cf. the recent Samsonov trade, which half this board will be lamenting by November 30th, despite it being a good trade). Also, what a lot of people forget is that without Niinimaa - or some comparable competent defenseman - the early season could have been disastrous for the Habs rather than the spectacular success that it was. When Dandenault went down with Bouillon still on the DL, Niinimaa was there so that Traverse didn't have to be.
  10. I remember that finger in Philly. It said it all - the Habs had that series locked up, and it was a perfect reply to all the abuse those notorious Philly fans must have been raining down on ol' BSmith.
  11. I'm typically a big optimist - I've got high hopes for Plekanec, Kostitsyn, Higgins and Kovalev to each float around the 60-point mark this year, to give you an idea of how optimistic I am - and I really don't see Lahti as much of a likely force this year. Granted, 20 goals is pretty solid in Finland. Only 12 players in the 14-team league scored more than Lahti's 20, and only 3 players scored more than 24 goals. But success there doesn't necessarily translate: 35-year-old Kent Manderville - remember him? At his prime, a fourth-liner in the NHL, with a career record of 37 smoking-hot goals in 646 NHL games - scored 19 in the Finnish league last year after being washed out of the NHL in 2003 (after a 2-goal, 82-game season). So I wish him the best of luck at cracking the lineup, but I don't see him replacing Michael Ryder, or even Perezhogin.
  12. Somehow they forgot Patrice's 28 goals and 63 assists. Incompetent.
  13. Not quite. There's winning and there's winning. Even if Price is the best goalie in camp, management has to ask what's the best route to making him a winner in '09, '10, '11...not just 07-08. Development can be a touchy thing, especially for a young goalie. Just ask Marc-André Fleury.
  14. I'm definitely against the idea of changing the look of the Habs' jerseys, but for the record, they've been this way for far less than 100 years. I don't have the info at my fingertips, but consider that they were initially maple leafs blue...
  15. Don't think one of them can be Begin. I would have thought so a year ago, but with his bad back and the advent of Maxim Lapierre, his presence in the lineup is a lot more up in the air than it used to be. I think it's good to try to avoid the C and the A's in the same clique - avoid the Koivu-Rivet tandem effect popping up again. That's part of why Kovalev and Komisarek make sense to me. Markov would be a natural choice as a guy in his prime with a long-term contract, but he's just too reclusive to wear a letter.
  16. Maybe that's why he stayed in Montreal. Where else can a sour-puss potato-faced grouch who can't express himself in any language (including Russian) be mobbed by 800 beautiful women while walking down the street just for being an extremely talented hockey player?
  17. A little correction to our collective amnesia... We're sliding into a memory of Brisebois being booed out of Montreal on a rail. Carbonneau seems to remember it that way, too. His departure was actually quite quiet, and not just because it was lost in the calamity of the lockout; Breezer was barely booed (if at all) during his last season in Montreal. This wasn't because he was playing better - he was playing better because he wasn't being booed. He quietly had a good season (not 4.5 good, but good) and then quietly left. The booing fireworks, the heart murmurs and the trip to Paris had become a thing of the past after training camp in September 2003. Even Jack Todd was saying nice things about his play in 03-04. Certainly the booing nonsense hung over his move to Denver, "as far from Montreal as possible", but this was no Patrick Roy - Ron Corey moment.
  18. As many D as there are on the team and in Hamilton, the Habs are shallow on Brisebois' side. I can understand people being hesitant about bringing the Breezer back, but I'm not sure that there are that many other options floating around for right-side veterans that would take 1yr/700K. If there are, let's list them and compare them to the Breezer - I feel like that would put this possibility in some proper context.
  19. Does anyone know for sure whether Cullimore and Salmelainen have indeed been bought out? I know they were both waived which is a necessary precursor to being bought out, and I read reports (that sounded suspect) that the Habs promised Chicago they would buy out Cullimore as part of the trade, but I never heard anywhere authoritative that either player had been bought out.
  20. I'd have to look this up, but Ryan Russell was a June trade, I think - for a 7th round pick from the Rangers. Degon and Rivers were free-agent signings in the minors in early July.
  21. I think I'm being misunderstood - of course no one wants the Cube on board if it means the difference between winning and losing. But it's so appealing to watch a small dude punch so far over his weight that it makes people blind themselves to the consequences of having him there. That's what makes him so dangerous to Habs fans.
  22. While certainly confined to the realm of the middling NHL player, I think I wasn't alone last year in finding Mike Johnson a bright spot in a dismal season. His quotes were always good, his effort was always there, etc, and while I think it's best that he won't be in a Habs jersey next season, I'm getting annoyed with the rest of the league for not tossing this guy a bone. I suspect much of the problem lies with the fact that he's named Mike Johnson. He might as well be John Smith, or Guy Incognito. If his name was something like Zarley Beukeboom, I'm sure he'd have been snapped up by now. And his self-presentation didn't go far enough in the branding department, either. Dark hair, brown eyes, scarless face - at least if he had a Chris Mason haircut or some kind of waxy old-timey handlebar moustache, hockey minds would at least be able to put a face to the name. Mike, if you're reading, please send a fax around to all the GMs letting them know that "Sizzler" Johnson, or "Rakeshaft" Johnson, or "Devastator" Johnson is a UFA so that you can sign a contract in August and we can see you play next year. Attach a stats sheet if you need to, but it'd probably be better to include a headshot featuring your new eye-orbital Maori tattoo.
  23. I've dug Streit ever since he was drafted 8 years late in the 38th round. Fun facts: Who scored more points for the Canadiens last year: Streit, Guillaume Latendresse or Mike Johnson? I'd love if he gets re-signed, but I suspect he'll be cast to the wind as an aging post-peak UFA after this year, particularly with the young D coming up behind him. Too bad.
  24. The Cube is dangerous - to opposing players, sure, a little, but more dangerous to Habs fans. Why? Because so many of them - particularly me - would rather watch the Habs lose with Bouillon than win with someone better in his place.
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