I don't want to talk about it

    We lost. Badly. As it turns out, Pekin did actually fix their arena, which was nice of them since then I could at least lose while being able to sit down and see the game at the same time. As it also turns out, Pekin now has a huge team and a bunch of really good hockey players (7 of them have played on Pekin's Central States team, which is just below triple A), which is not a great matchup against us, who have a smaller-than-usual team this year and also can't field consistent 5-player lines that don't have weaknesses in them. We're also used to having the best goalie in the league, but he isn't playing this season, so we have someone who should be our backup playing as the starter. 

    During our 6-1 loss, the referees managed to make both teams feel cheated. Between highly questionable line calls, inconsistent enforcement of the rules, and them somehow being the only people in the entire building who didn't notice the puck cross the line on what should've been our first goal (scamming me out of an assist in the process), it's safe to say that nobody was happy with the referees after this game. At least they noticed the person slashing me hard enough to leave marks on my arm late in the 3rd period, but at that point the game had long been over. 

    But I can't blame all of our problems on the referees. We failed to generate any meaningful offense for most of the game, getting outshot 35-14, especially in the first period where I think we only had 2 shots throughout the entire 14-minute period. Our defense wasn't bad, considering the talent difference between the average player on our team and the average player on their team. I think that our top line matched up well against their lines, although we struggled a bit more when our younger players who haven't played against opponents of this caliber were on the ice. Overall, I think we learned some valuable lessons from that game that we can take into the rest of the season to improve ourselves, including the big shift of moving one of our best players from defense back to offense instead after we noticed our lacking forward pressure. 

    Tonight at 8:20 we play against Bloomington, who are coming off an 8-0 win, with one of their players having 4 of those goals. I despise these weeknight away games since I have to leave home at 6:30 and I don't get back until after 11:00. It'll make me even more annoyed if I go all that way just for us to lose badly, but I'm sure that won't happen again...

Weekly standings update: us in red vs. Bloomington in blue


Comments

  1. Letitia MoffittNovember 11, 2022 at 2:33 PM

    That's quite a feat the refs achieved -- woo hoo, everyone gets cheated. Sorry about the loss, but the icy blog is still fun to read. Onward.

    ReplyDelete

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