So how about a few photos from tonight's game versus the Crunch? Yeah, I thought you would agree, too. These photos are through glass, and I haven't done any editing tricks, yet, so...
Here's Josh Tordjman making a stop early in the first period.
Here's Pascal Morency going for a little spin on the ice.
Here's is Jarod Palmer's first goal.
Here are the guys celebrating Palmer's goal.
And here's Palmer moving in to stop Nate Prosser from getting into further trouble.
That was a nice 3-1 win by the Aeros over Syracuse tonight. The team didn't play there best hockey -- Mike Yeo had to call a timeout four minutes into the second period because of the team's play -- but needing a win over a last place team while playing the first of a three-in-three, the Aeros came through big time.
So, let's get on with it.
1. Injury news first. Matt Kassian is suffering from a lower body injury and will be out several weeks according to Yeo. They're still hoping to get Drew Bagnall back next week.
"He’s a warrior, though," Yeo said of Bagnall. "As soon as he’s ready, I know he’ll be in there."
2. One of the more impressive things about the win was that because of the annual Wild injury carousel, coupled with injuries here, the Aeros had a lot of guys playing tonight who haven't put in a lot of time with the big team this year. This is something to be expected, and they're having to come in and play without a lot of practice time. So though the ice time was really limited Joel Broda and Pascal Morency tonight -- probably because Morency couldn't stay out of the penalty box whenever he stepped on the ice -- guys like Jamie Fritsch did get some ice time.
Yeo attributes the play of these guys tonight, and that they were able to fit in without looking like sore thumbs, to the system the team's playing. The regulars on the team have bought in to what Yeo is selling, and they're making sure everybody else goes with it as well. And this, according to Yeo, is what successful teams do. They get a system and everybody works with everybody to make sure the plan is implemented.
3. That leads us to Jarod Palmer, the star of the night on the line of the night. Palmer finished with two goals -- and came "just this close" to the hat trick -- playing on a line with Robbie Earl and Chad Rau. And Palmer put all of the credit for everything he did on those two guys.
"What can I say?" he said. "Pucks just seemed to bounce my way for me tonight. Sometimes things go your way, sometimes they don’t, and when they go your way, you’ve got to take advantage of it and try to put one in the back of the net. I had some help by line mates. A couple of pucks ended up right on my tape right in front of the net. That wasn’t all my work. That was a lot of team effort there. It wasn’t too hard to put into the net."
4. Earl and Rau have really been clicking as a line this year, but it's always seemed to be just missing one piece. But they've been working their asses off and Palmer just seemed to make all of the difference. But Palmer said Earl and Rau did everything within their power to make his game tonight possible.
"Those guys, they help me out a lot by just talking to me," Palmer said. "Coming off the ice every shift, around the bench, they’re telling me where they wanted me, where I could have been to be in a better spot, where I could have passed the puck to get it to them in a better spot. Just small details that they mentioned to you that you’ve got to listen to and pay attention to. If your teammates are talking to, it makes everything a lot easier."
5. Yeo was excited by the play of Earl/Rau/Palmer. He thought they played an excellent defensive game to go along with what they did on the offensive end -- the other goal came from Chad Rau on the power play. He liked how Palmer was willing to get in position around the net and he thinks Earl and Rau did good work with creating open ice that made Palmer's work possible.
6. Palmer also gives a lot of credit to Yeo's system, and to the veteran leadership on the club.
"I think we have a lot of structure as far as where we’re supposed to be and what we’re supposed to do," he said. "It’s well known. It’s preached constantly by the leaders on the team. A lot of the guys walk the talk, and that helps a lot. A lot of leadership on this team. You’ve got Ortmeyer, DiSalvatore, O’Sullivan – just some guys, some of our leadership left – Peters up in the bigs right now – still, there’s enough here right now that we can take in some new guys and keep rolling. It’s a tough challenge."
7. Just a note of clarification: we didn't let Heather talk to Palmer because the last time she did, he went into a huge scoring funk. So being a superstitious lot, we just let her hold a tape recorder and listen.
8. Nice game by Josh Tordjman in goal tonight. He let in a first period power play goal that briefly gave Syracuse the lead, but that came off a deflection which kind of left him helpless. But I don't know if we can continue letting Heather sit with us in the press box when he plays because she's screaming and squirming and hitting and punching with worry that something's going to go wrong.
9. After tonight the Aeros record is 37-23-1-4 (79 points), and they're still in second place. Go down and look at Andrew's post for the latest on the standings and the things that still need to happen.
10. Nice stat of the night: the Aeros are now 18-1-1-0 when holding opponents to zero or one goal.
11. I noticed tonight that the Aeros are celebrating the "Roudiest" Fan Of The Game in their Hilton Hotel giveaway thing. Has this been the case all season and I've just missed the typo? My question: how did the video people at Toyota Center -- not Aeros employees -- miss a typo like this? That used to be one of my functions with the Astros and Texans, making sure no typos like that went up on the video boards. So was this a one-time only thing, or not? I know I just noticed it, but that doesn't mean it's new.
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.”
**************** 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.”
************** 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.
******************* 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.
****************** 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.
Barry either needs to be UP for good or ... well, he just needs to be up for good, because I'm working WAY too hard during these games to get my goalie a win.
Every goal that goes against the Aeros, I'm WILLING with every fiber of my being, the boys to even up the score. And while they did it every time, I'm not sure that's really a sustainable expectation. Who am I kidding? It's absolutely not a sustainable expectation with this low-scoring team. It took two rather unlikely scorers in Testwuide and Lannon to make it happen.
That love from the hockey gods that I promised? There it is. Say thank you.
And hey, betcha nobody went home complaining about a boring game, did ya? It was maybe ... too exciting? Okay, I'm just never happy, am I? :)
One thing I realized, and got Stat Boy (Andrew) to confirm, was that this was the highest number of goals allowed this season while still getting the win. Not sure the value of that stat but I so DON'T have a brain for stats, so I was happy to come up with that.
But here's one that didn't go in. End of the second, lots of pressure in the Aeros end, have that feeling in the pit of my stomach like, "Uh oh, here comes the back-breaker" and then BOOM. Brusty.
I'm not even going to tell you the noises that came out of me on that one, but well... anyway... OMG. If I could marry a save and have its babies, that's the one I'm locking up.
I know, you'd think I'd marry a poke check, but you can't take a poke check home to your parents. The unapologetic bad boy of saves, you don't really want to give the poke access to your savings account, am I right? Would totally party with the poke check though, and maybe get a little tempted by it down the road in a weak moment.
But the glove save... THAT glove save especially... you can feel good about saying 'Yes' to. It's not gonna let you down, but it's still pretty nasty, so you know you won't get bored with it either. ;)
Anyway, big roadie coming up in the mid-west. Hopefully the Aeros penalty kill is hitchhiking around Illinois somewhere and they'll pick it up and use it. That was BRUUUUTAL tonight.
We should have a fun road trip bonus of photos from our Milwaukee-area pal, Chris Jerina. Always fun to see the boys in their road darks and it's nice of Chris to cruise around and catch the games. See ya in a couple of days.
The AHL announced today that the Syracuse Crunch will host the Binghamton Sentators in the league's first-ever AHL outdoor game on Feb. 20, 2010, at New York State Fairgrounds.
This is something the league hopes will turn into an annual event, although they have not returned my call about when the Aeros would be able to host the event.
For those that want to be a part of history, here is how you can:
"Tickets for the Mirabito Outdoor Classic can be purchased starting at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, November 25 by calling the Crunch office at (315) 473- 4444, calling TicketMaster at 1-800-745-3000 or by stopping by the Oncenter Box Office, located on the State Street Side of the War Memorial."
From Syracuse.com comes a little story on former Aeros Steve Kelly. Kelly's currently a free agent who is still recovering from surgery on his hip, which he injured last March when playing for the Crunch.
But don't worry about Kelly. Should he come up with no other career options (Europe?), he's got a back-up plan. He's going to become a police officer.
On a side note: Kelly was a good go-to guy in the locker room for quotes the year he was here. Which reminds me that in about a couple of months I'm going to have to start figuring out who the new go-to quote guys are.
Here's Pascal Morency going for a little spin on the ice.
Here's is Jarod Palmer's first goal.
Here are the guys celebrating Palmer's goal.
And here's Palmer moving in to stop Nate Prosser from getting into further trouble.
I'm not even going to tell you the noises that came out of me on that one, but well... anyway... OMG. If I could marry a save and have its babies, that's the one I'm locking up.
The AHL announced today that the Syracuse Crunch will host the Binghamton Sentators in the league's first-ever AHL outdoor game on Feb. 20, 2010, at New York State Fairgrounds.
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