3/21/10 -- Aeros v. Admirals -- The Carry That Weight Edition

My apologies for taking so long to wrap up this weekend’s games. I cover more than just the Aeros -- thus my absence the past several weeks -- and there’s been breaking news with the Houston Cougars I’ve been having to deal with. Plus, I’m once again unemployed from my primary profession, and I’ve been trying to hunt up some work. So, that aside…

It’s been about a month since I’ve seen the Aeros play in person. The last game I remember seeing was the game where the news leaked out that Tony Hrkac was returning. So yes, it’s been awhile. But besides the Aeros dropping to the bottom of the standings, nothing much has changed. The effort’s still there. The guys still seem to give a damn. But despite the return of Andy Hilbert over the weekend, they still can’t find a way to get the puck in the damn net; the stupid penalties are still prevalent at unnecessary times -- Brandon, really, did you have to pull a Matt Foy on Sunday? And the goalies, no matter the criticism they’re getting from unnamed people, are doing their best to keep the team in games, but the goalies this year just aren’t able to do a repeat of the Nolan Schaefer/Barry Brust season of 2007-2008.

There were two winnable games over the weekend, but nothing the Aeros did seem to work. Well, I do think Kevin Constantine throwing out a starting line on Sunday of Matt Kassian, Robbie Earl, and Carson McMillan brought a different energy to the team. But the team lost 3-1 on Saturday and 2-1 in overtime on Sunday to the Milwaukee Admirals to drop even further back in last place.

Anton Khudobin got the start on Saturday, and he put up a good effort on Saturday, only to find himself, once again, sabotaged by his defense and lack of offense. And Wade Dubielewicz found himself victimized in overtime by a shot that hit the pipe and bounced in.

“It’s tough,” Dubielewicz said after the loss. “We’re a young group, we’re working hard. It’s really discouraging right now. We’ve got to find away -- whether it’s a big game out of a goalie or a big game out of player -- we’ve got to find a way to get out of this little funk we’re in and try to get some wins together. You never know what’s going to happen to other teams. But right now we’re backed into a pretty tough corner. Something special’s got to happen for us. Somebody’s got to do something special for us to get out of it.”

Dubielewicz said it was his hope, before the game, that he would be the one to provide that special game. He wanted to give his teammates the win, but he just couldn’t do it. And if ever a game was the epitome of the Aeros season, perhaps Sunday was that example. The Aeros outshot Milwaukee. They even had some great shot attempts, but there was some good Milwaukee goaltending to stop some of the shots, then there were two third period shots that clanked off the pipes, but instead of bouncing in, as the Milwaukee shot did on OT, they bounced out.

“There’s no quitting here,” Dubielewicz said. “And I’m proud of that. But at the same time, this is professional hockey, and we have to make plays, and we have to make saves, and we have to score goals. If you don’t do that, you’re not going to be around hockey for a long time. It’s really disappointing on that level because there’s a lot of character in this room. I think with a break or two we could be a different story.”

A break or two. That’s the been the team’s story the entire season. A break or two. And that break or two is something that they have yet to get. With just 11 games remaining in the season, the 29-30-7-4 Aeros should probably just forget about getting that break, unless, that is, you count as a break the opportunity to go home and erase this once-promising season from their minds.

SOME MISCELLANEOUS NOTES:

Andy Hilbert returned to action this weekend for the first time in months. The Aeros season was probably doomed to failure by Hilbert’s concussion, and the injuries to Peter Zingoni, because they were probably the guys with the best set of offensive skills on a team that desperately needed offensive skills. And while they missed large parts of the season, and guys like Nathan Smith spent time in Minnesota, the Aeros were just never able to put together a sustained offensive effort. But Kevin Constantine doesn’t want to use that as a crunch for what happened this season.

“You try to look at the fact that everybody goes through injuries,” he said Saturday night. “You try not to rely on the injury totals, or call-ups, to dictate -- if you look at guys called up through over the last three years, we haven’t really been a team that’s been completely dependent on certain injuries and call-ups. Other guys have managed to win.”

And Constantine has a point. Then you look at other things. For instance, Krys Kolanos was generally the guy called up to the Wild last season. And Kolanos’s trips up didn’t help the team. Then again, Kolanos wasn’t the team’s only offensive weapon last season. Corey Locke was putting up big numbers. So was Jesse Schultz. Marco Rosa put up good numbers. Things might have been different last season if Kolanos were to have been up with the Wild and Locke and Schultz were injured and unable to play for most of the season, but that didn’t happen.

And the team before that didn’t have much in the way of offensive talent, either. But Schaefer and Brust were both putting together incredible seasons that were beyond special, and which are not the type of numbers generally put up by a tandem because. And the primary guy who spent most of that season in Minnesota was Erik Reitz.

I appreciate what Constantine’s trying to get at. He’s not trying to use an excuse to explain away the season. But Zingoni and Hilbert were supposed to be key members of the offense, and with their extended absences, nobody on the front line has stepped up to take their place on a consistent basis. Max Noreau has tried from the blue line. And no one can discount the effort and hustle of Jean-Michel Daoust.

Well, you get my point by now, I hope.

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Okay, I know I’ve been away for awhile, but what happened to all of the Lady Dynamics? I saw five at each of the games, the same five. What happened to the rest? Did they bail on the team, or something?

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My Beatles selection tonight is dedicated to the goalies, Anton Khudobin, Wade Dubielewicz, and Barry Brust. Too often this season, it seems that they’ve had the weight of the world on their shoulders as they’ve tried to single-handedly carry the Aeros to victory. Thus, I bring you the final melody of side two of Abbey Road (the greatest album ever recorded), which just happens to feature the only drum solo ever performed by Ringo Starr as the drummer of The Beatles. So here’s “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End.”

12/28 -- Aeros vs. Crunch -- The Get Back Edition

Before I go further, I want to apologize to all of you for being so late with posting this. I’ve had a rather awful day -- I hate temp jobs, especially when they end weeks before they’re supposed to end -- and I got home to discover some new problems with my COBRA, so I’ve been dealing with those issues.

Now that out of the way…

The Houston Aeros won a game tonight that they normally shouldn’t have won. They got the 5-4 OT win while getting help from some unlikely sources -- Ryan Lannon and J.P. Testwuide -- and some expected sources who appear to be beginning to heat up a bit. They had what appeared to be some bad goalie play, until you stop and think about what Barry Brust was dealing with all night. They scored a goal on the power play, but gave up three goals on the penalty kill.

Yeah, this isn’t the type of game that this season’s Houston Aeros normally win. But win they did. And in doing so, they won not only the most exciting game of this season, but also the final home game of this calendar year.

It was a game in which the Syracuse Crunch got the first goal -- a power play goal midway through the first period that Barry Brust didn’t appear to have a chance at stopping. The Aeros tied the game at 15:27 when Ryan Lannon got his first goal since the 2007-08 season when he was with the Wilkes-Barre/Scanton Penguins (paper demands fulfilled by Dunder-Mifflin). Lannon’s high shot from the circle just cleared the top pipe and bounced back out onto the ice almost immediately. But it was a goal nevertheless.

Syracuse took the 2-1 lead in the first, but Andy Hilbert, who had been close to scoring the entire night, got a beauty of a pass from Chad Rau and slipped the puck into the net to tie the score at 2-2 (it’s a shame they didn’t show the replay of this goal inside Toyota Center because it really appeared to be pretty damn nice. The Aeros then took the lead at 15:15 when Jon DiSalvatore got the power play goal when he knocked in the rebound of a Hilbert shot.

Syracuse tied the game on a power play goal just 44 seconds into the third when Bates Battaglia went five hole. And two minutes later, the Crunch took the 4-3 lead when Tomas Kana fired the puck past Brust -- once again, on a power play. But the Aeros didn’t quit and Jean-Michel Daoust, after having several shots bounce off various portions of the pipe, finally knocked one into the net at 4:05.

And there it stayed until 52 seconds into the OT when J.P. Testwuide, who had earned his first professional point earlier in the night when he assisted on Daoust’s goal, got a pass from DiSalvatore and launched the puck for the goal. A goal which was also his first goal as a professional.

“It was kind of late in my shift,” Testwuide said. “I just came in off the half-wall. We had a guy drive the middle lane, I think it was Daoust, he was driving down, and I knew if I just got the puck there, I’d probably get a whack at it and he might get a whack at it. And luckily it snuck right under his arm.”

It wasn’t the kind of win that Kevin Constantine wants to see from his team every night, but it’s still a win, and neither he nor his guys are going to turn away two points.

“And I’ll give them credit,” Constantine said of his team. “We kept battling. It’s hard to win when you don’t score first. That was only our third win all year when we don’t score first. So it’s hard to win, anytime in hockey, any team you’re playing, when you don’t score first. And we managed to hang in there long enough to find a way to win the game, so that was good.”

With the win, the Aeros are now 17-14-2-1 (37 points) on the season. They’re just two points away from being part of the huge logjam for second place -- Peoria, Milwaukee, and Rockford -- are all tied with 39 points. And with two straight losses, the Stars are now only seven points up on Houston.

The Aeros will finish the calendar year out on the road. They play in Chicago on Wednesday, Rockford on Thursday, and Milwaukee on Friday -- Happy New Year! They’re back home on Sunday for their first game ever against the Abbotsford Heat.

SOME MISCELLANEOUS NOTES:

It would be easy to say that Barry Brust didn’t have the best of games between the pipes. After all, he surrendered four goals. But three of those goals were on the penalty kill, and at many times, he appeared to get let down by his defense. And think, if not for Brusty’s play, the score might have been much, much worse.

“If you looked at that game though, we still probably gave up nine odd-man attacks, six two-on-ones, add another five-six three-on-twos, those came in bunches,” Kevin Constantine said afterwards. “So if you looked at about a five minute segment of that game, it wasn’t good at all. But if you looked at the other fifty-five minutes, we were better than we were the other night.”

But if not for Brust, those five minutes might have destroyed the team. As it is, while he’s happy with the win, Constantine’s still not happy with his team.

“I had exhausted my intensity in the last two days,” he said. “I really was disappointed in both of our last games. We talked long and serious as a team about our last two performances prior to this. I mean, we got a win against Grand Rapids, but lucky. And didn’t play well the other night. So I think our guys were really determined to be a better team tonight.”

One line that Constantine’s happy with, though, is the line anchored by Andy Hilbert. I’ve been watching this line the past several games, and it’s often seemed to me that they’ve been just inches away from breaking out for a big game from the unit. So tonight we had Rau setting up a Hilbert goal. We had Hilbert setting up Jon DiSalvatore and Jean-Michel Daoust. And Daoust got the game-tying goal.

But leave it to Constantine to set me right by noting that this is something that’s been happening for the past ten games, at least offensively, though he hasn’t exactly been thrilled with their defensive intensity.

“I think, over the last 10 games, his line, and he, have been very good offensively,” he said. “They’ve had a little bit of a struggle, as a line, in their own end, but offensively, they’ve been very, very good. And Andy [Hilbert] was very determined tonight. He’s a really good guy, and he’s a good leader, and he really cares. I think he wanted to do something, to make a contribution, to kind of get our team playing a little better. Obviously we needed his points tonight. So he was a big part of this win.”

I talked to Hilbert after the game, and he agreed with Constantine’s conclusions.

“As a line, I think we played well,” he said. “The last couple of games we’ve had a couple of rough games for our line in particular. Tonight, I thought we played well, but I thought the whole team played well tonight.”

Constantine noted Hilbert’s leadership qualities. And how much he wanted to contribute tonight. Hilbert says that just how he plays.

“That’s how I think I like to lead, by example. I’m not a huge rah-rah guy. I think, if you go out and work hard, and other guys see that you’re out there contributing, working hard, doing the little things, it just filters on down through the entire team.”

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How about that game by J.P. Testwuide? The rookie got some nice playing time during the playoffs last season, but he has yet to score any professional points. Until tonight.

“It was just a good pass by [DiSalvatore],” he said of his goal “He gave it to me, kind of, at the beginning. And then he got open, and I gave it back to him. A great play. Luckily it snuck in there.”

Constantine noted that neither Testwuide or Lannon -- who had his first goal in two seasons -- are on the team to score, but he’ll gladly take their contributions on that end.

“We had two [defensemen] score their first goals,” Constantine said. “Nice to get contributions from those guys. We don’t expect them to have to worry about that, but when they can contribute like that, it’s great.”

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Here are some miscellaneous stats. Tonight was the first time 12/26/08, in a 5-3 loss in San Antonio, that the Aeros have allowed three power play goals in one game. It was also, according to Constantine, only the third game this season that the Aeros have won after giving up the first goal.

With his goal, DiSalvatore joined Daoust as the team’s only 10-goal scorers this season. Didn’t Kolanos have 10 goals after five games last year? Hilbert now has 12 points for his last 10 games (3-9=12). Daoust has nine points for his last 10 games (6-3=9). Chad Rau has eight points for his last 10 (3-5=8). Max Noreau has nine points for his last 19 (5-4=10). Jon DiSalvatore has eight points (7-1=8) for his last 10.

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Now excuse me while I go off on a rant….

I would like to once again thank Jamie Spencer with the Wild for getting us the weekday game replays. But maybe he needs to have a talk with them and ask them to actually replay the Aeros goals. For some strange reason, the first two Aeros goals weren’t replayed tonight. I would have really liked to have seen Hilbert’s goal again as it looked like a great play by Hilbert and Rau in real time.

But then again, I don’t want to detract from the Kiss Cam, I guess.

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And The Beatles video is really easy tonight. This game was kind of like one we saw last season. Lots of scoring, some lousy defense, and lots of dramatics. So I say tonight’s game calls for “Get Back.”



Happy New Year everbody. Thanks for reading. And please, may 2010 be a better year than 2009 has been.

12/11 -- Aeros v. Peoria -- The Can't Buy Me Love Edition

The last time the Houston Aeros played a home game on Teddy Bear night, they scored five goals on five shots within a matter of minutes in the second period. But that was last season when they had some offensive talent. This year, not so much.

The 5110 people who attended the game, luckily, got to throw their stuffed animals out on the ice toward the end of the second period. But that was about all that they got to as the Aeros lost 2-1 in an effort that had me longing for the futility of the Houston Texans.

Peoria’s Tyson Strachan scored at 4:45 of the first period on a play initially set up by Mitch Love down in the Peoria end of the ice. The Aeros scored on a five-on-three power play at 17:30 of the second when Andy Hilbert converted the rebound of a Max Noreau shot for a goal. The scoring action ended at 4:30 of the third when Peoria’s Brett Sonne took advantage of an Aeros screen to bounce the puck past Anton Khudobin to make the score 2-1.

There’s not much else left to say. The defense was good. The guy’s hustled. I think the forwards even took a couple of shots. But they lost, at home, once again. And yet, the Aeros are frustrated. Khudobin’s frustrated that he has to play perfect hockey, and that the offense isn’t doing what the coaches are telling them to do, especially on the power play. Kevin Constantine’s frustrated by the team in the general.

The team’s record dropped to 12-12-2-1 (27 points) which is good enough for fifth place. They’re four points behind Peoria and Rockford -- who they play on Sunday. They’re two points, but many percentage points, behind Milwaukee. And they’ve dropped a total of 15 points behind Texas, and the Stars are quickly pulling away from the rest of the division.

The Aeros will give it another shot on Sunday as they take on the Rockford IceHogs at 4:05.

SOME MISCELLANEOUS GAME NOTES:

As Andrew mentioned below, we talked to Khudobin after the game, and he’s getting frustrated by having to play perfect hockey for the team to win.

“It’s kind of…it’s hard when we score just one goal,” he said afterwards. “On the power play we have to shoot more. Shoot, shoot, and shoot all the time. Because for a goalie it’s really hard, we have to…actually the coach is saying we have to have a guy in front of the goal, but [the other goalie] doesn’t have [that]. Never. Lots of screens, that’s what we need.”

I don’t know about the screens part. There always appear to be a lot of Aeros swarming the goalie and blocking his vision, it’s just that nobody ever wants to take a shot that will take advantage of anything. The team does need to shoot more, especially on the power play were they pass and pass and pass and pass and pass and pass and pass and pass and pass and…the power play’s over.

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The coaches have been trying to figure out what to do about the team’s inability to win games at home. Constantine said he and the assistants have been analyzing everything they can think of, but nothing seems to be working.

“We’re working hard to try to do what we can to win games at home,” Constantine said. And in a way, based on what Constantine, that could be part of the problem. He said that the team plays simpler games on the road, and that at home, they’re trying to do too much. Perhaps Constantine needs to do something to convince the Aeros they’re actually playing a road game.

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Cody Almond returned from the injury list, playing his first game since forever. He and Andy Hilbert -- who played in his only 11th game of the season -- showed what appeared to be some much needed life on the offensive end. But the rest of the squad didn’t appear to be able to do much of anything. Almond, Hilbert, and Khudobin were easily the team’s bright spots tonight.

I know that I was frustrated by the game. This was the first game I’ve seen in nearly three weeks. Since that time, I’ve covered several Houston Cougar football games, as well as some Houston Cougar basketball games. Normally, there’s more exciting than hockey, but after watching the Cougars run up and down football fields and basketball courts, this game was, decidedly, boring. Luckily, or not, I won’t be around for Sunday’s game as I’ll be out of town.

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I hate the “Kiss Cam.” I especially hate the “Kiss Cam” when they do that stupid thing and put the camera on two players from the other team. I think it’s juvenile. That said, good on Mitch Love for playing along with this stupid thing tonight. He didn’t kiss a teammate, but he kissed his glove, then patted a teammate’s helmet.

I know all of you are pining away for Corey Locke and Krys Kolanos -- I’m not, again, going to go into the legit reasons that they’re not back -- but damn, I miss Mitch Love. He was just always doing stuff like that.

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That Mitch Love response brings us to our Beatles video of the night, “Can’t Buy Me Love.” I play that because, well, Love is gone. I also chose this song because, no matter what Khudobin asks, there just seems to be no way the Aeros can buy enough goals to win a game.

So, here are The Beatles with “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

Bye-Bye Andy and Nathan, For Now

According to the mighty tweet of Michael Russo, Andy Hilbert and Nathan Smith are on their way to join the Wild in place of the injured Cal Clutterbuck and Petr Sykora.

Minnesota Wild Injury Update

Just a follow-up to my post below. Michael Russo has tweeted that Clutterbuck's injury is to his ankle, and that it appears to be serious. Sykora suffered an injury to his groin. Andrew and I were kind of tossing this around after the game, and my first inclination was that Craig Weller and Andy Hilbert would be the two guys called up to the Wild. My thinking with Hilbert is based on my opinion that he would not have agreed to the two-way contract if he did not get some kind of assurance that he was going to be one of the first guys recalled to the Wild.

Andrew was thinking Weller and Colton Gillies, though my thinking is that Gillies is still unable to play because of the broken nose. And Heather read somewhere while we were talking that Danny Irmen could be in the mix.

Who knows? I haven't really gotten a handle on all of the new players yet, nor have I gotten a handle on the team. I've only seen three of the four games, and one of those games I watched on the internet. Also, I'm not really sure of what Todd Richards is looking for with the Wild.

10/2 - Aeros v. Moose

Manitoba looked like Manitoba and the Aeros looked like the Aeros tonight as the teams came together north of the border to kick off the 2009-10 season.

The final was 4-3, and while the Aeros jittery play did smooth out later in the game, in reality, it was not as close as the score might indicate. Aeros seemed to put nearly every shot right into the chest of Cory Schneider, and when you're dealing with the AHL Goalie of the Year, you just can't do that.

Frankly, the scoring attempts were more reminiscent of the season before last, though I think once the new guys who have been up with the Wild throughout Aeros camp have a chance to practice with the squad that's been here, you'll see the play smooth out an awful lot.

The talent is there, for sure. Colton Gillies earned the first Aeros goal of the season when he put a pretty power play rebound past a scrambling Schneider, and then had the only assist on Andy Hilbert's goal. Then Hilbert got an assist on Noreau's buzzer beater that Earl apparently deflected in. And Craig Weller also assisted on Gillies goal. That's 5 points for the once-and-future NHLers on the squad, so as long as they're here, they should be a real boon.

Of course, one of the craziest things about hockey is when a beloved player moves to another team and then plays his old team. And for Marco Rosa, who is now a Moose, it couldn't have turned out better. He got the first goal of the night, nay the first goal of the SEASON, for the Moose and the #1 star. Bada-bing! Nice seeing you, Rosie!

Oh, and how about that final goal from the Moose? If you didn't see it... the guy shot from the high slot or thereabouts. Basically a hard dump-in. It went over Dubie's head, bounced off the glass onto the top of the net, and then rolled off the top of the net and into the goal.

It was one of those moments as a goalie where you just think, "I should have been a right wing." Poor guy.

He did have an amazing save early in the game where the Moose had him down on his blocker side and passed to his glove side, shot it just inside the post, and he dove over and got a glove on it.

And of course, I can't wrap this up without mentioning the 88 minutes of penalties in the second period. Not a typo. 88. What the what?

Well, first, Kassian and Desbiens went at it and Kass just pounded him. He's really such a gentleman fighter though. Clearly Desbiens was hurting and Kass kept his grip on his sweater but gave him a few seconds to find which way was up before pounding on him some more. All class--you know, for guys who are punching each other in the face.

Then Stoner laid a nice hit and Ramsey took offense and jumped him (and got instigating and game misconduct penalties on top of the fighting major), but Stoner handily beat the snot out of Rammer. Stoner had some huge open ice hits tonight, too. Heads on a swivel when that guy's around. Holy cow.

Lastly, somehow Noreau and Smith both got into fights and the whole kerfuffle had about as much of a line brawl feel as you're gonna get with the modern rules around fighting. Smith got a slew of minutes for tha,t as his was a secondary fight.

That's it! Here's the game sheet if you want to see all the extracurricular shenanigans that went on.

Same bat time, same bat channel tomorrow night.

Who starts in goal? Dimples or Dubie? I wouldn't say Dubie is the hot goalie right now by any stretch. If I'm KC, I see what Dimples can do.