I Might Have Been Wrong

I admit it, Tyler Myers looked very good tonight. He's such a good skater, he can handle the puck, he seem to have a pretty good grasp on when to pinch and when not to, he looked fine on special teams, he threw his body around when needed, and he was remarkably composed for a 19-year-old playing in his NHL debut. Montreal's forwards are not very big, and it was only the first game of 82. I still think that if he stays up, we're likely to see him wear down some as the season goes on. But if Myers continues to play like that for the remainder of his 9 game audition, it's going to be awfully hard to send him back down. I was impressed.

I have a few things to address about this game (special teams, Henrik Tallinder, the forwards, and goal reviews, just to name a few), but since we don't play again until Thursday - brilliant scheduling on the part of the NHL - I'm going to save some of those topics for other days. For today, despite the loss and despite a couple of problems, I'm really pretty happy with the game. The effort was there, the team as a whole was definitely tougher than last year, Jochen Hecht looked so much like the Jochen of old that I wanted to cry, the rookies were fine, Chris Butler continued to look great. I'm going to try not to get too excited because I seem to remember last season starting well too, but with a couple of tweaks (i.e. friggin' GOALS), I could watch the team that played tonight for 81 more games easily.

On a personal note, Marlowe experienced her first Sabres opener tonight. Overall it went well. Every time we cheered she popped up and started barking and jumping on us. A little disconcerting since she's usually pretty quiet, but she was going into the spirit of things well.

"Seriously. Now can we take this thing off?"

One down, 81 plus to go.