Game Management Bores Fans and Ruins Game

Rockets Trip Giants
Vancouver 3 Kelowna 4 OT

I don’t know what the league is doing, but the favourtism from the officials has reached laughable proportions. This game could have been a good game except for the horribly inconsistent and simply awful officiating – give the goat’s head to Kevin Bennett who simply made the stupidest fucking calls ever. That aside the franchise is broken and when you have the owner (Ron freaking Toigo) calling his franchise player TYSON in a high profile interview (multiple times) while they are interviewing he and TYLER Benson you know you have issues. I mean seriously how fucking stupid and mindless do you have to be to call your up and coming superstar by the wrong fucking name?? It’s clear Toigo has no fucking clue about his team or how it is being run. That’s not a harmless mistake – that is a damaging error of mammoth proportions. I still can’t my head around how misinformed you have to be to make that kind of mistake.

The other interesting comment made by Steve Ewen recently in a podcast was that Craig Bonner was the glue which held this group of back-biting, egotistical fucktards from imploding and it’s pretty clear to me that he hit the proverbial nail on head. Since Craig’s departure they have been a group lacking cohesion and focus. Hay left because he couldn’t deal with Bonner and Bonner is too much of a milquetoast to actually have some balls to do something to improve his team. He can no longer whine about how it was “all Hay’s fault”. Time to blow up the whole freaking thing, Bonner, Toigo, all of the coaches and even the PR staff who seem to think that more stupid PR schemes will help all of the team’s woes. Time to fire Bonner’s Dad and Ripplinger who as player development whatever title he has gifted himself, has neither scouted nor developed a player to their highest level of skill in his tenure. Why he got a contract extension is anyone’s guess. I personally am so done with this lot of clueless clowns that it is time to clean house across the board. Maybe losing another 1000 season ticket holders will wake them up, because that is what is going to happen.

Okay on to the game. I would have liked a lot more physicality in this game, a lot more. Noel dressed 7 possibly 8 defensemen and Atwal bounced from forward to defense most of the night. The Rockets had a tough time getting momentum 5 on 5, but capitalised on some pretty damn soft and bogus penalty calls. I was sitting next to the Sportsnet camera-guy and he showed me some replays through his eye-piece and confirmed that the late “charging” call was not only NOT charging, but was a very nice clean, shoulder to shoulder check. The Giants used a PP to open the scoring. Kelowna capitalised on poor coverage coming into the zone in the second to tie it up. They added a PP marker to take their first lead. The Gs found the back of the net early in the third off of a weird bounce and a broken play. The home team added a goal ahead marker on the PP a few minutes later. The Rockets tied it up off of a bogus charging call on a clean check. The Kelowna squad then took the win on yet another PP off of yet another weak call. The “checking to head” was marginal, they got the wrong player as it was Baer who actually made minimal head contact (sorta), not Jones. Basically all-around incompetence ruining a decently played tilt.

Mason Geertsen opened the scoring on the PP, wiring a ballistic smart missile from the point. Brennan Menell and Carter Popoff had the helpers. Kelowna tied it up early in the second and then used a PP marker to get the lead. In the third it was AP player Dawson Holt finding a puck that caromed off of the stanchion on a dump-in and bounced out front of the net and Holt going to the net got the loose puck past Michael Herringer. The goal was unassisted. Alec Baer used a PP in the final frame in regulation to take back the lead. Menell got his second helper of the night and Jackson Houck got the other point. The Rockets used a PP gift to wire one past Cody Porter from the face-off dot. The Rockets used yet another bogus soft call in OT to put the game away.

Team Notes: Sward still out with injury. Lots of end of the year awards they didn’t seem to be organized enough to show which award was going to who on the big screen. A real fail, in my mind.

Fight Night: nada – not a lot of emotion and clean hard checks were being called charging, so the refs were eager to manage the game to death and they did.

Zebra Cage: Ryan Benbow and Kevin Bennett. Bennett in particular was very useless in this one and called seriously soft penalties at bad times. None of his calls affected a scoring chance or scoring rush. Benbow was no better. The last home game I saw the Giants got called on penalties where the opposing players dropped their sticks after having them slightly tapped. Tonight I watched three separate times where the Gs had sticks slashed out of their hands with no calls. Yet Dosanjh slashes a Rocket stick (with the Rocket player dropping it pretty easily) and it is called slashing, why were the other ones not called slashing? This league has no credibility when the game is called very differently by officials in most every single game. I think it has become a major league issue as the officiating this season has been wholly abysmal.

The Giants marginally out shot the visitors 26-25. They went 2 for 5 on the PP, while their opponents went 3 for 5 off of the aforementioned bad calls. I wasn’t too impressed with the boys in this one. I have to give them kudos for some of their goals and finally getting some production from their PP. No single Giant player stood out for me. I liked seeing Stukel take the puck to the net. I enjoyed Benson’s tenacious play. Houck was invisible, despite getting a PP point. I am too tired right now talk about specifics – both physically and emotionally. It’s been a long and suffering season and until they fix all the problems behind the scene it matters not what level of players they get on the ice. Time for a Giant broom to sweep away the troublemakers and pretenders.

Tri-City and PG’s wins tonight mean that even if the Gs did win tonight they would still be out of playoff contention. As they should be, they have not earned any post-season berths for a few years now and even when they did squeak in they would be swept four straight. This franchise has now become a joke and if major over-hauls do not take place in the off-season they will lose season ticket holders in droves and their best players due to overwhelmingly apathetic ennui.

Three Stars
1. Dawson Holt (seriously?)
2. Leon Draisaitl
3. Tyson Baillie

No hardhat for me. I really didn’t think anyone elevated their game enough to be set apart. No one was awful, but no-one was great.