Instead of what I usually do, living in Pittsburgh, which is not see any preseason games, even on TV, this season I drove up and went to the first two live (the second with my father). It was a lot of fun.
Thoughts on forwards: I really liked what I saw from the Stepan, Frolov, and Gaborik line. Stepan looked really comfortable between them, and I would take that as a first line. Fedotenko was nothing special - he didn't do anything I liked or anything I didn't like. Dale Weise was a reasonable 4th-liner, and Dane Byers endeared himself to me by taking down Clarkson after he kept being a fuck to Avery. Zuccarello had a few cute stick-handling moments, but nothing else too special, except that seeing him stand next to Boogaard was hilarious. Callahan and Avery both looked fantastic.
Thoughts on defensemen: Girardi, Staal, and Rozsival (yes, Rozsival) all looked solid. Del Zotto looked awful (yes, he was the first star of game 2; that doesn't mean he wasn't awful). Of the new guys, Semenov and Valentenko were the most solid-looking.
I'm rushing through these thoughts partly because I have a lot of work to catch up on and partly because a bunch of roster cuts have been made (25 on Friday, and another 11 yesterday), so some of these thoughts don't matter. I'll go into those in the next post.
Goddamn it, it was good to watch hockey again.
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