There is a point in every Detroit Red Wing's life where he decides he wants to be either a majestic whale cruising the open ocean, or a fail whale beached upon the shore.
Preseason whatevs, they fail whaled last night. Very insulting that they played the way they did. I mean, we all want to be playing hockey from September til May and June. But the Red Wings pretty much think they shouldn't even have to compete to get there. What a stuck up organization to just not care about defensive coverage just because it's early October. You almost feel bad for Osgood.
Except not.

Chris is crying in the corner, as his supply of bananas and lard has been exhausted.

Oops, actually that was the wrong pic:

You can see how we can get them confused. Jiri Hudler in this one is a dead giveaway, though.

Final thoughts on camp, anyone? Here are some basics:
- Tangradi in front of the net is like sex.
- Everyone loves Mark Letestu. If you feel the same way we've come to be in great support of the hashtag #letestify.
- Tyler Kennedy can't buy a goal. We love him but ehhhhh.
- Engelland is a bamf. Michalek is a bamf. Martin is a bamf. Tang is a bamf. The entire defense are bamfs.
- Comrie playing for the league minimum is going to look insane.
- The core players--namely Fleury and Malkin--are looking as sharp as ever.
- When we think of Thursday our tummies feel fuzzy inside.


lots of love.

Go Pens.

So yeah, nobody's perfect.
Corey Crawford for Vezina.
Can anyone think of a sea creature metaphor to go along with this game?
What do you think it is going to be?
FUN ANSWER IN THE BOTTOM OF THE POST


Max clearly thought he was a pony jumping hurdles for the blue ribbon. Baby, focus. Please.


The press from this game sucked, too. We don't understand Chicago media. Sometimes there are great pics from Hawks games. Other times it's like, random people doing random things. Like this:

At least Eric Godard is in this picture otherwise it would be culturally worthless and detrimental to society.

We should like, not recap another Hawks game until Patrick Kane stops being greasy. Which will be never. He will ooze grease from the grave.


that's right, today's sea creature is a whale shark!
Agree? disagree?
Ponies and whale sharks.
That's all we can really bring to the table for this game.
Sorry.
Detroit this weekend or something.
We are in fact working on a season preview and a Muskrats shoppe (yes with two p's and an e) and other fun things.

GO PENS.

I'm so fucking over the Hawks it's ridic.  I also have a Real Life and do not plan to spend another minute of it looking at Patrick Kane's fugly face.  So, on the level, nobody here at PH watched this game.  Without further ado, I present to you a photo montage of what I choose to believe happened during this totally irrelevant preseason game.

*Ahem*

We all heard/were tortured with endless tweets about the salary shitticaine that the Hawks careened into this summer.  At no point was I surprised when Bowman sent this on the ice:

Skill players.  Seabs, is that you?

Uhhhh, Max....  Quit it.  OK, don't.  I love it, actually.

Game started like this:

Then Q was all,

And Max was like,

Dustin Jeffrey did things that made Zoe almost forget that he's an asshole.  Almost.  It was 2-0 and Captain Serious got all, "Shit, shit, fire ze missiles!"

Bombs were dropped, but Engelland was all over it.

Seabrook continued to be pretty enough for Max's taste.

And we all know Max has taste.

Third started like this:

That's Johnson. Nick Johnson.

And ended like this:

Letestu, FTW.

Boom.   4-1, bitches.

Alternative Three Stars are currently somewhere on this woman's face.

Hawks Fail 2.0 tomorrow. I may boycott it, too.

Go Pens.

Well, this was nothing like it.

There was in fact a really high quality illicit feed of Pittsburgh's CW up and running last evening, so we were able to see this affair in all of its glory, and we can tell you:
Everyone is on PCP.


Except Stevey, who only has to strangle a woman within inches of her life to attain his success nightly, and feel damn good while doing it. Unfortunately his supply of Pittsburgh hookers has probably moved on to greener pastures, so the Pens were able to pull it out towards the end, winning the game 3-1.

When the teams were actually skating, this had the air of a regular season game. When they stopped to air out their laundry it became not only ridiculously preseason, but reminiscent of bull elephant seals biting each other's throats:



This possibly happened because Jared Boll was selling shitty weed.


Why on earth was Kris Letang so angry at Jakub Voracek? The world will never know. But Jakub got his ass handed to him.

ALASKAN STORM Tim Wallace fought Dorsett. It was kinda random:

But the real majestic event of the evening occurred when for some bizarre, unknown reason, Malks and Fat Rick attacked each other:

And Rick got his ass handed to him.
Frigging unreal fight, just for the fact that it happened.

Of course, some Pens scored:



And everything was generally a-okay.
The subservient bull elephant seals retreated into the surf and all was right with the world.

We have 150 Hair League entries btw. Exactly. We can accept 50 more before we have to shut the club down and put out the fire. Who's in?
Bet everyone's feeling a lot more confident about picking Ktang now, huh?
Well, it's preseason. Don't get cocky.

Final notes:
- Simon Despres is already awesome, if he does another year in junior he's going to be a hot commodity. Develop, baby, develop.
- Ratchuk is a stupid name.
- Can we please continue to play Gary Glitter after goals? We need to keep some vestige of 90's Pittsburgh skeeze in the building. Just insulting. Damon Albarn is for wins and wins only.
- The alternative three stars were eaten by this seal:


GO PENS.

You, too, may have gone through the day today feeling like nothing was real.
Even if it was fairly meaningless hockey, the Penguins were going to play tonight. If you're like me, you were just trying to get through and on your way to a place where hockey could enter your life once more.
Mike Lange's dulcet tones.
Phil Bourque getting really excited.
Oh. . .and you know where everyone was going to be tonight:

This preseason we're not giving awards (at least not all the time), but Consol Energy Center gets the inaugural Jizz Award.

Early in the game, Mike Comrie did something:

If you were listening on the radio in some faraway land trying to pick out your outfit for tomorrow, you jumped up and down and squealed in a circle and were like HOLY SHIT MIKE COMRIE. This is what I did. Don't hate.


Malkin was nonplussed.


Brad Stuart and Tyler Kennedy made love.


Sidney Crosby wanted to make love, too, but only with the ice inside the net.


Jesse Boulerice beats the shit out of the man who broke his jaw, just because this seems like the appropriate time.

Ryan Craig begins his takeover of the world, and we have our first GROUP HUGZ shot of 2010-2011.

It is at this point that Chris Osgood threw a temper tantrum and demanded that someone bring him pulled pork.
So Johan was on his way to get some pulled pork and extra lard cakes for Chris but Brooks Orpik was in the way. What shall henceforth be known as the Pulled Pork Affair sent the rest of the game into an utter murky, liminal space of death and fatty foods.

Ruslan Salei tried to fix things early in the second, but not much was happening, and Osgood still hadn't received his pulled pork. Babcock did not appreciate the course that the evening was taking:


Dan Bylsma, on the other hand, was very entertained, and was pleased, as he had forwarded a lot of the pulled pork in the building to his old team, the Anaheim Ducks, for Bobby Ryan to sample.

The search for pulled pork became dire when both Brett Sterling and Ryan Craig (again) scored past Osgood. Franzen called from the locker room and said that Osgood's Pork Concierge had been found bound and gagged in a broom closet attempting to smuggle illicit food items into the arena. The hounds were called off, the mission was deemed useless.
Both teams spent the rest of the game taking penalties and some child named McCollum was put in net for the third. Glad to be relieved, Chris clutched an old t-shirt on the bench which he seemed to think bore the lingering odor of bacon grease.

ALTERNATIVE THREE STARS


1. Malkin

2. Letestu


3. A KFC Double Down

As you may know, the best thing to come out of this game aside from the five goals was the #chrisosgoodisobese hash tag on Twitter.
Share and explore.

GO PENS.

Just something about this picture that suddenly makes all of the shenanigans of the last year okay, that makes Consol Energy Center okay, that gives us a supreme sense of confidence about the coming months.
Like looking at the future.

You probably support the Mellon Arena memorial idea that Matt (PensBoozeAnger on Twitter) came up with that Pensblog is propagating and which you may have heard mentioned by Mark Madden before he awkwardly segwayed into a discussion about the Tennessee Titans. Come on, this would be cute. A little unsure how it would look considering the partitions in the window, but worth a look fersher.

If you're not hopping on Twitter to read a blow-by-blow of training camp (i.e. those of us who can't make it due to other obligations or egregious geographical inconvenience), you're missing out. Check out the following:
PensDeptoTFP/JoeDepto
EricP55
pghpenguins (obviously dur)
Any other good ones? Leave them in the comments.
Hockey is the only reason that we're on Twitter (with the possible exceptions of winstonbananas and SpigotTheBear).
Get some. Learn some.
Go Pens.

A vote has been passed to demolish the Civic Arena, which we can now call it again since Mellon's naming rights expired over the summer.
The only question probably is when, since there will probably be court battles involved in saving it.
It would certainly be nice to find a way to use it again, but we all know that the cost-effectiveness of converting it into a usable structure for other purposes versus putting in a fucking parking lot is an obvious choice for bureaucrats. You can't have another arena competing with the Consol right across the street; it causes a lot of event-planning ambiguity and nightmares. A proposition we've heard floating around is turning it into some kind of atrium-community-center but it would cost a lot of money to convert, probably more money than you will make in your lifetime. We don't know what's best for the Hill since we don't live there. Let's just say: it'll be a sad day when the Civic Arena is gone.

When the fuck is training camp? Oh, this weekend? fjklsdfjsdlfjdsklfhndsjkslkfjdsklhl

blah blah Jordan Staal foot infection blah blah blah.  He will get better soon and we have faith.

Go Pens.