saneopinion

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Canada, AB • Canada •

Preseason means nothing. Peca Vs. J-Bo

It has been a pretty good pre-season thus far. Unbeaten and seeing some surprising faces score is certainly encouraging but enthusiasm for the upcoming season can often put the blinders on reality. For instance it is nice to see Kotalik trying, I did say we should give him a chance a long time ago, however he will not out score Iginla in the regular season. In pre-season he has about 4-5 more points than Iginla though... Just won't happen. T.J. Brodie is fun to watch but even if he makes the team, which I don't think he will, he will not contend for the Calder. Instead, he will be an 8th defenseman, we should hope he gets sent down to play! Even though Calgary is undefeated and riding a winning streak when the regular season starts it's a whole new ball game, Goalies raise their game, veterans clobber rookies and injuries happen. This pre-season is nice but has no bearing on the regular season. Sorry to be a downer.


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Okay this Peca thing... Look the guy was an awesome player once for his role, his role was to play defense as a forward. His insight is probably true to some extent but I don't think it was fully explained. A defenseman's job is to separate the forward from the puck and start it the other way. That is the mandate from tyke on up. There are a couple ways to do that, you can body check and be an aggressive player or you can also play positional and ride out forwards limiting their option along the way. As we saw with Goutier and often Phanuef in Calgary that too often the aggressive types take themselves out of position to make a hit, often resulting in a scoring chance for the opposing team. On the flip side there are the positional D, like the Lidstrom's of the world who just play smart, not overly aggressive.

Sure Peca may have liked playing against Bouwmeester because he wasn't overly aggressive, he probably never got flattened by Bouwmeester but that doesn't always mean it's a worse way of playing. He also stated that he loved getting turn over's from Bouwmeester, yeah probably, that was his specialty after all. If I asked Mike Peca how many guys he got turnovers from what would answer be? Hundreds? That was his thing! His two Selke's basically spell that out.

In Peca's defense though I think Bouwmeester could play better, I've stated before that his first year was a gimmie from the fans but if he has another season like that our wrath will be huge. He's Wade Redden if that happens. Totally unacceptable. His turn over that Peca was talking about would have meant a demotion to the minors if it was a bubble player and as well it should...it was a bush league outlet play.

S>O>

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