A Washington Stealth Fan Blog
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Today Edmonton comes to town town for the first of their two visits this Spring.
The Rush are a good home team (4-3) and sub-par road team (0-2). They’re not a bad road team yet, their two road games have been at Colorado and at Arizona. But they did beat Arizona when they hosted them and they can’t say the same about us.
I don’t think too much is different from the first match up last month when we went to Edmonton and won 11-9. Curtis Palidwor is still a brick wall in since being traded. He’s only allowing 8.8 goals a game which is probably a league best for any goalies that play full games. What was the NY Titans thinking in letting him go? The rest of their defense is also playing well.
The Rush offense is lead by Chris Gill. Last month his leg was injured and he wasn’t 100% in the game against us. He’s had some time off, including the All Star game which he was selected for but had to miss. If he is back to full strength he’ll present more of a challenge than he presented in the first game. Jimmy Quinlan, who made the All Star game as the Edmonton representative was been very cold. Despite his goal and three assists in the All Star game, in his regular games he’s been ice cold the past month. Keep doing that Jimmy.
On the Stealth side of the ball our biggest obstacle will be having fresh legs since we played last night and the Rush have not played this weekend. At least the flight from Portland is only about 90 mins, so it wasn’t long and wouldn’t keep the players out late. We played Wes Green last night and rested Callum Crawford, so I expect to see Callum in the line up tonight. The offense is a little more cohesive when he’s in the lineup instead of Wes. Wes is a dodger and Callum plays more in the team offense. Not that this is bad by Wes, Burkholder plays a similar game on the other side of the field, but is better at the one-on-one moves than Wes because he’s got more experience with the indoor game.
Defensively for the Stealth the core unit was back together last night with Kyle Sorenson back from his one game suspension. He did a good job last night, perfectly in a defensive sense, because I didn’t realize he was out on the floor until late in the first quarter. The less we hear a defender’s name the better. Kyle never clears the ball like Meat, he just defends and gets off the floor. Good job Kyle. On back to back games we sometimes switch goalies for the second game, so maybe we see Aaron Bold in cage tonight, but I doubt it. When we were switching goalies it was for someone like B. Miller or Rob Blasdell who are are both All Star caliber goalies, which can’t be said about Aaron Bold. Bold won the game in Calgary for us, but given a choice I pick Cosmo over Bold.
With four wins in a row and our guys in a mindset to win win win, I think we’ll handle Edmonton just fine today. We’re winning the close games that weren’t going our way last year. So as long as we won’t get blown out early we’ve got it in the bag. I think we’ll win 13-9.