As she put it....
"Today on NHL.com Paul Kukla offers up his choices for what he calls the Tops with a Twist, a set of "awards" that don't get a shiny trophy and a big awards ceremony but probably should."

In a nutshell, who would I give these awards to?

Best one-on-one offensive player: *crickets* Let's say Malkin, once he gets himself firmly IN THE GAME.

Best one-on-one defenseman: I'm going to have to go with Chris Pronger. He may be a complete jackass, but he gets to job done.... no matter what. If we could just train him to keep his elbows to himself, we'd have a good little blueliner.

Assist man: Hm. I'll go with Michel Ouellet, who always seemed to be feeding people good pucks. (le wtf, Pens management, giving him to Tampa Bay?)

Best pure goal scorer: I'm going to go with Jarome Iginla, as what I remember of the Flames playoff games is him repeatedly getting in a position to score or scoring but not ever doing anything else all that exciting.

Power-play specialist: Ryan Malone.

Shorthanded specialist: Duh. JStaal. Kid's ridiculous.

Need one save: Oh Bryz. You try SO HARD and get so little back for it, in terms of playing time and love.

The guy you never heard of: Martin St. Louis, who one of my co-hockey dorks now absolutely adores.

Biggest impact on a new team: Hopefully Le Petite Briere will get the Flyers' collective heads out of their singular giant ass. I would not be opposed to driving 1.5 hours for hockey instead of 4, but they'll have to REALLY convince me.

When it gets chippy: This one I am giving to George Parros. I do love me some pornstache.... and he has 0 goals, 0 assists with 150 some penalty minutes from last season.

Coach for a must-win game: I don't know.. Lindy Rupp makes some awful great angry faces.

Get under your skin guy: Army. Definitely. And not just because I adore the kid.

The home crowd: Ducks or Flames, i think.

...and a few new categories of Caps Chick's:

Most overrated player: Sidbits. Don't kill me.

Most underrated player: Vinny Lecavalier, who sort of got lost in the Sidbits shuffle. (that sounds like a real winner of a line dance.)

Worst arena to play in as a visitor: Wherever the Red Wings are, because that means you're playing the Red Wings.

Worst arena to play in as the home team: I'm totally giving it to Mellon.

I have no idea if that's how you actually spell "kwah" as in the french word for "what" but we're going to run with it.

There is no Penn State hockey blog.

This is sad, and must be rectified. If I can find a group of suckers from PSU-Harrisburg, we may well have to have the Penn State Hockey Train (whoo-whoo!)up to UPark for home games. And Rink Rash may well become a very Penn State/Hershey Bears flavored drink.

I may also have to smack the dude who bid the Penn State hockey jersey out from under me on Ebay. I hope it gives you a rash. Yeah, you, Mr. Outbid The Poor Student By A Quarter. A rash.

In life news, life is good, classes look interesting, and I look poor. So pretty average for the beginning of a school year.

When the hockey comes back, then we'll talk.

Sidney Crosby on the way to being the next Ian Thorpe.

But seriously folks. Does anyone else think he'll be doing hockey-specific underwear next? Because that's about the only thing we HAVEN'T seen him do. Oh yeah, possibly the watch company sponsorship.... I think Omega's a swimming-specific sponsor at this point.

(edit: Okay, I do sort of love seeing Random Man in Kilt in the background of the 'Lifestyle' section. Why yes, I'm from the part of Canada that still thinks it's in the UK, why do you ask?)

Also, what do they put in the water in Thunder Bay, Ontario? Not only the Staals, but also Taylor Pyatt's from there? It's enough to make me want to test the theory, move up there and have a kid, just to see if it's the town that does it or some freaky genetic thing. Maybe they're running tests on people and nobody knows it... instead of putting fluoride in the water, they're putting some wierd hockey steroid in.

In other news, Penn State has a hockey team. This I did not know. I'm not surprised, but I didn't know. Something tells me I may have to make le voyage to Penn State Mothership after all.

Vive la hockey.

Dearest NHL types.

Getting rid of the $200 dollar personalized jerseys is quite possibly the dumbest thing you've done. You've just stranded me without a way to support my favorite team/player, as I am NOT of an income bracket where I can afford to pay $400 for a jersey. I was slowly scraping together the $200, to be delivered to your hot little hands mid-September, but $400 won't happen for at least 4 more years.

And please, PLEASE don't get me started on the pink jerseys.


WE ARE NOT AMUSED.

I keep saying to myself "You've only got 6 minutes left in this game on YouTube,(Pens v. Canes, 10/14/06) just FINISH IT" and then finding something else that distracts me into pausing it. (And don't get me started on how the Google Video copy of it skips right from Army laying the hurt on Letowski at 11:20 in the first to the beginning of the second period.)
What paused me this time was a need to ask this question:
I get why women are never NHL coaches, because they haven't played in the NHL (and therefore have no idea what they're doing. I understand the flawed logic, AND can give you a way to fix that, but I digress.) How come all hockey ANNOUNCERS are male? Granted, some of them are hired as past NHL players to do commentary, but for every one of those, there's another dude who's employed by the network just to jabber on aimlessly and rattle off numbers as fast as he can. Would it be that shocking to hear a female voice doing that? I mean, if the guys can say stuff about JStaal's "shifty hips" I don't think anything a female says could be taken much wronger in OR out of context.

Also, just call it a groin pull. Enough of this "lower body injury" stuff. If you pulled something near your manly bits, you pulled something near your manly bits. We all know you have them, so just talk about them like you're not ashamed.