A Washington Stealth Fan Blog
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Tomorrow, Friday March 2rd, the Stealth travel to Edmonton to face the Rush for the first of 3 meetings this season. Edmonton has one more win than us, but that’s just because they’ve played Portland already.
When the Stealth win this game we’ll both have 3 wins and then we’ll obviously have the tie breaker. That of course means nothing because there are 8 games left in the schedule after this week.
Edmonton is a much different team than they had last year. Last year they were new and not quite settled in. This year they’ve been around the block once and learned a few things. Most importantly the learned that their goalie sucked and went out and picked up Curtis Palidwor from the NY Titans. The second important thing they noticed is that they weren’t scoring goals, enter Chris Gill from Colorado during the off season. Gill is an All Star reserve this year. Finally, they’ve got Andrew Turner as their All Star Game starting defender and they’ve got one good person at each position at the floor.
They’re a much better team than last year. But I think the Stealth can hold up with them. Edmonton has one good defender, the Stealth offense has 5 good shooters. That’ll be a problem for the Rush. Edmonton has one good shooter and the Stealth have 3 good defenders, so Gill should consistently be covered. According to the weekly league conference call Gill is maybe a bigger threat off the ball than with the ball. So our defense will have to cover away from the ball AND not get a lot of penalties doing it. It’s a tall order, but the defense must love the challenge. In goal Cosmo had a great game last week, got back in his stride. Palidwor is also doing good in net and will make some saves that Matt Vinc was missing last week.
It’s a conference game and I think that’ll get our guys in to it more than last week (and we opened that game up 5-2 in the first quarter). If we win it’ll start a winning streak and begin the push to secure a playoff position. This will also motivate the guys. So I’ve got us winning the game. It’ll be close because we don’t know how to blow anyone out.
Stealth win 13-12.
We head in to the All Star Break with two straight wins and 4th place in the West.