Islanders-Hurricanes: Pregame Ponderings

The Carolina Hurricanes and the New York Islanders are both ready to go at it again, this time at the RBC tonight at 7. So far, the road team has been the victor in each game this series. I have no official word who will be in net tonight, so I’m not even going to hazard a guess. The Canes have a week off for their version of the All-Star break, so they don’t need to rest anyone.

I forgot to mention that Tim Gleason dropped the gloves in the game yesterday afternoon and he did a fine job of waking up the troops. Hopefully, they won’t need waking up tonight.

Sergei Samsonov continues to impress and has 7 points in the 7 games that he has played for the franchise. What has impressed me the most though is his determination on defense. I thought that he was supposed to be invisible in his own end, but that has not been the case for the Canes.

The defense has scored 3 goals in the past 2 games. That’s huge for this group. Can they keep it up?

In some other news, the Leafs finally relieved John Ferguson Jr. from his duties for the franchise. Cliff Fletcher is the interim GM. Will coach Paul Maurice be far behind? Is Jim Rutherford still on their radar?

I have continued my discussion about the Southeast Division over in SESO. James Mirtle posted an updated article showing some brutal numbers of how poorly the Division performed over the years. It’s not pretty. But when I see numbers like those, I wonder to myself, why? There must be some reason the Division is so bad. I did some number crunching myself and came up with a theory. It’s an interesting subject to me and something I will continue to monitor in the future.

Finally in some different news, a couple of blogging friends and I, (Scott from Casonblog, and Andy from Hurricanes Insider), are participating in a new podcasting venture called Canescast! We plan to pow-wow regularly about Canes related happenings and share our opinions regarding such. The first broadcast was recorded the other night and it was a lot of “beep” fun. In the future, we hope to have other bloggers join us and maybe have some guests as well. Special kudos to Andy for getting it off the ground!