All Star Game Weekend
By Tim Redinger
While the NHL doesn’t start it’s All Star Game festivities until tomorrow night, Fansided starts there’s tonight! Don’t miss out as me and Frank from The Rat Trick take on the roles of Staal and Lindstrom and have our own mock draft for the All Star Game on Rink Side Rants tonight at 9PM.
The 58th Annual NHL All Star game kicks of Friday night as Staal and Lindstrom have their own fantasy draft to select players to their respective teams. After they finish drafting the All Stars, the rookies will be assigned to a team. On Saturday, the teams will face off in the annual Skills Competition, with the weekend concluding with the All Star Game and release of all the superheroes in the NHL/Stan Lee Guardian Project.
With no Buffalo Sabres heading to the All Star Game on Sunday, many in Buffalo may only be tuning in on Saturday to see how well rookie sensation Tyler Ennis competes against the rest of the NHL in the skills competition.
With no football to watch this Sunday, how much of the NHL coverage will you be watching with any interest?
The NHL wrapped up its pre-All Star game schedule last night, and no one did the Sabres any favors. Both the Carolina Hurricanes and the Atlanta Thrashers won their contests, so the Sabres remain six points out of the final playoff spot, with Carolina between. If the Buffalo Sabres can continue to win at their current rate, they may stand a chance at cracking the top eight, with seven wins in their last ten contests; of course winning is the easiest way to pick up points, we will defintely take any help from the teams ahead of us losing as many games as possible as well.
The Sabres are off the ice until Monday when they can resume practicing, but do not have another game until they face the Pittsburgh Penguins on February 4th in Pittsburgh. Currently on a two game winning streak, the Sabres will look to put three wins together for the first time this season, a fete they will most definitely have to complete before the end of the season, if they want to prove to anyone that they deserve to be in the top eight, regardless of how they get there. If the Sabres cannot string three or more wins together I would struggle picking them to win any seven game series.
There is of course, the words that Ryan Miller spoke last year during the playoffs as they struggled to come up with wins against the Boston Bruins:
They say you have to win four games, they don’t tell you what four games that you have to win.
That is a very true statement, and I think any fan in the Buffalo are would sign up for a win two lose one streak all the way to a Stanley Cup victory. The only problems is to ensure that you could stick to that schedule. If they can manage to sneak into the playoffs, they might give us a special run, just look at what the Montreal Canadiens were able to pull off last year, knocking out both the Washington Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins, heavy Eastern Conference favorites. Buffalo fans love playing the role of the spoiler, so if we can know a team or two out before we get ourselves handed tee times, I wouldn’t complain.