It was a humbling trip to the great white north for the Seattle Tsunami as we were completely outclassed in the C division. First off, thanks to Bubbles for all the leg work and organizing the trip-- it went very smoothly considering all the logistical mish-mash going on with people staying all over the place and coming at different times. Not to mention all the logistics with the rules and equipment.
Thursday night's game was proceeded by a moment of silence for Vic. Both teams lined up with helmets off at their respective blue lines, and they had everyone in the arena remove their hats and stand to honor and remember our lost friend-- truly a classy move that i'm sure was appreciated by all.
The quality of play was definately better than Vegas and we were in the "C" division! There was a 7 goal differential mercy rule. 20:00 STOP time for both halves. We were 0-3 and did not qualify for Saturday's playoffs.
game one: 7-0 (mercy about half way thru second half). Andrei was awesome in net (on his birthday to boot) as it could have been 7-0 in the first 10 minutes and he kept us in it for a while. He played great overall but this was definately his best game.
game two: 9-2 (mercy only 1:00 minute from finishing the game-- drat!) Carlo and Bubbles were the goal scorers. Carlo's goal was particularly sweet considering all that has happened in the last two weeks and appropriately there seemed to be a bit of divine intervention at work on his goal with some crazy bounces, not to mention Carlo's hard work and crashing the net. It seemed only appropriate for him to get our first goal of the tourney. GG scored a beauty of a breakaway going to the deke and burying it top-shelf.
game three: 7-0 (mercy at end of first half). Our worst performance of the tourney and the chippiest game of the three with Scott and Bubbles taking some pretty serious crosschecks behind the net.
There were plenty of reasons for the smackdown-- skill gap, conditioning, lack of subs, and no organization or consistency in our positional play. Furthermore the competition is just on a different level; someone told us that in Edmonton alone there are 14 divisions and 170 teams playing organized ball hockey. I don't know if that was actually true but it sounds good and took a little sting out of the losses.
On the comical side, Chris Koh was our Don Cherry wannabe, bench boss for two of the games because of his bad back. If you think he's coaching and yelling at our pickup games you ain't seen nothing! Also, some guy named Brandon from Canada tried desperately to get added to our roster and followed us around everywhere we went like a lost puppy-dog mascot.
I hate losing, but all-in-all it was fun and I feel safe in saying that we all had a good time. A good learning experience. It was worth it for the Vancouver night-life alone-- i gotta find a way to move up there! hahaha . . .
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