My Two Cents

If someone offered me a penny for my thoughts today, I'd come away with two cents. I only want to touch on two things, and then I'm off the grid today as I have a million and one things I want to accomplish before I return to the old salt mine tomorrow. Needless to say, there are some things happening today in the world of hockey, and I'll point those out at the end of this scribe. Let's get to my two ideas worth a total of two pennies, though.

First, HBIC is running its World Junior Championship Contest right now. All you have to do is predict the top scorer in the tournament, the two teams in the final, and the gold medal game final score. It's easy, and there are three awesome prizes to win!

Get your entries in ASAP!

The second thing that happened yesterday that caught me off-guard was a strange, fluky goal in Calgary. The game between the Canucks and Flames was a hard-fought, Northwestern battle as always, but things seemed to go off the tracks for the Flames after Miikka Kiprusoff was victimized by a Mason Raymond goal. Check it out:

Oops. Raymond's second goal of the night was certainly one that Kipper would like to have back in a big way. Raymond capped off his natural hat trick later in the game, but Calgary was simply a different team after this goal.

And one last thing that totally caught my attention was the announcement of the Swedish Olympic team yesterday. Ok, that didn't catch my attention as much as the omissions did. Johan Franzen? Not included. Stefan Bergsfor? Not on the list. Mikael Samuelsson? Not there either. And Samuelsson was not happy about it.

"Probably going to get in trouble for this, but they can go (expletive deleted) themselves," Samuelsson said to CTV's John Marchesan after the Calgary-Vancouver game.

Wow. With all the injured players on the list that head coach Bengt-Ake Gustafsson, I suppose that Samuelssson has a right to be angry. You just never hear it put so eloquently.

Lots of hockey action on today if you're looking for some hockey on TV. 3:30 EST has Canada taking on Switzerland at the World Junior Championships on TSN, 2:00 EST has Team Canada playing HC Davos at the Spengler Cup on Rogers Sportsnet (tape delayed in for west of Ontario), and the NHL has a whole bunch of games on tonight. Check out some hockey action!

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!