Back From Vacation

Some of you have noticed that I have been absent for about two weeks while the Tbirds have won three straight (maybe I should just stop writing about this team and we'll win the Cup).

I had to travel to Atlanta for a wedding and spent 10 days there with some extended family. Interesting yes… blog worthy? No.

I did however get to attend the Atlanta Thrashers – Washington Capitals season opener at Phillips Arena, which was awesome with the exception of the very scary incident involving Thrashers goaltender Ondrej Pavelec. Being in the building when it happened was very scary and fortunately it looks like Pavelec will be just fine.

In the meantime, the Tbirds rattled off 3 straight wins. 2 of those 3 wins coming via the shootout. It's amazing how different things can feel when you win those shootouts as opposed to losing them. Last season, Seattle would have likely lost those two shootouts and the result would have been a team that had lost 3 out of 4. Instead, the Tbirds are riding a 3 game winning streak and the difference was only a few shootout attempts. That extra point is pretty huge both in the standings and mentally.

You'd have to be pretty happy with the club after 6 games. Tbirds are 4-2 so far with 4 of those games coming on the road and 1 of those games being lost in the final minute of the contest. Their 20 goals and 16 against projects them for a 240-192 total over the course of the 72 game season and that should certainly be good enough to have them in the playoffs.

Scoring has been very spread out with Gallimore and Jacobs leading the way with 5 points apiece and 10 other players with at least 2 points. Better yet are the plus/minus totals. Sutter leads the team with a +6, which is a tremendous sign as I still think he will continue to improve a ton over the course of the season. Wells and Dillon are +4 and Noebels and Lund are both +3.

Nice to see Mitch Elliot off to a nice start with 2 goals and 4 points… if you had told me at the start of the season that Eilliot might score 20 goals and 50 points I would have been thrilled. Very nice start by this team.