Jerking Around the Summer

So the summer session of Jerky Boys has entered playoff mode. That means a nice little summary of how the season wrapped up. I'd tell you about the first playoff game from last night (we won), but since I was planning on an end-of-season recap, I won't discuss playoffs until playoffs are over.

So how'd we wrap up? I didn't get thrown out of any games, despite my last post. We played three games after that post. The first game after, we went against the best team (record-wise) in the league, Pine Riders. They beat us, but only after we took the goal-fest into overtime - they won 11-10 (yikes!) But I got to keep my rage in the cage since they were by far the nicest team this season. Any time I got bumped, there were rounds of apologies, even from guys not involved with the contact.

The following game, we had a second tilt of the season against Hardbodies. I got to have some fun in this one. We lost, but the 2nd period saw some action against their puke-of-the-game, #68. He thought it'd be fun to park his butt on my crease, but what he got was a stick to the back of skates, which caused him to trip into the crease (no penalty). After muttering some not-so-nice-things, he got up and decided to stand in the crease. For that, he got a right-jab to the back along with a few nsfw insults (no penalty). He started to retaliate, but one of my d-men, Lucas, got right in his face, shoving and scrumming it up with #68.

The play went back out to center-rink, before #68 collected the puck and tried to skate through everyone and score, but I stopped him, which didn't mean he stopped being a jagoff. He put his stick in my face, or so it seemed, but the way I made the save had my stick come up and lock his stick into my glove. So when he started to attempt to pull me out of the crease skate away, he didn't get very far, since he wouldn't let go. The puck got loose and batted out of the area, so I let go of my stick so I wouldn't get a penalty for holding his stick (no penalty). He whined about it the whole length of the rink. Honestly, I was surprised the ref didn't give me any penalties for any of those - I wouldn't have faulted the ref had he called a penalty, since I was trying my hardest to get under his skin (success!)

We lost that game, but it had more to do with porous defense than anything #68 did to try to get me off my game (he made a few love-taps at my shoulders).

Last game of the season, we had our second tilt against the Renegades, but the rage stayed caged. No one attempted to crash the net unlike the first tilt (3 crashes, once with my mask coming off). We won that game, which put us up 2-0 against Renegades. It's a shame they got punted from the playoffs in the first round, because going against them would have been a nice treat.

What I learned: in the absence of Spilner (and the presence of his replacement), the defensive chemistry went down. For that matter, I think there were only two games (maybe one) that we had the whole team for, which didn't help, either. I also learned that sometimes I need to take matters into my own hands, a'la the previous post (and it sort of worked against Hardbodies). And while I'm discussing taking things into my own hands, the third thing I learned is that I don't need to be afraid to bring my glove to my right side if it means preventing rebounds and freezing the puck to stop the play. I've been getting burned on low shots after I let up a rebound and the other team scoops it up for an easy goal.

Next post will be the post-playoff wrap-up. Hopefully that won't happen until after August 26th (earliest date of a championship victory), but it won't happen any earlier than August 19th, when round 2 is complete.

What to expect? We play against Pine Riders (nice manners but good enough to play nice). In the other series, hopefully Eternal Underdogs and Hardbodies can bloody themselves against each other to be easy pickings either against us or Pine Riders.