Well well well, here we are once again, to Bassam's pleasure.
Another 15 games later, now 30 in the season. What has changed for the driven and newborn Nordiques? Much!
We are first in the league with 52 points for 30 games played.
Washington is second with 42 points in 33 games played.
Team record is now at 25 wins - 3 losses - 2 overtime losses. I would have had 2 more losses, but NHL lets you restart games without any consequence, so there are 2 games that i did because i lost both 0 to 1. First game, with more than 40 shots on goal on my side, and the other team had 2 shots on goal and 1 puck got in at 15 seconds from the end.
The other game, same story, except for some reason one of my players stole the puck from my goalie and put it in the net at 20 seconds from the end, instead of letting the goalie freeze the puck! Weird! But i will talk about retarded NHL 09 situations a little bit later. Now, on with the stats!
First of all, not happy with my team and instead of playing around with the lines (i do that a lot), i decided to switch the team completely around. Some of you might ask why i am not happy with my team when i am leading the league by far. I am simply not happy with the fact that none of my players are even close to being in the 1st spot for goals!
First, i thought that i was playing pretty good defense wise and didn't need a player like Dion Phaneuf gobbing up so much of my allowed salary (he was something like 6 millions a year). So i traded him for Roberto Luongo. I thought that a strong and constant goalie would help the team a lot instead of 2 rookies. I kept the two rookiers mind you, and sent the one with the lesser potential to the minors.
Then i went to the free agents and got myself Vincent Lecavalier and another big winger (Gougeon). Since i do a lot of checks, i thought that a big center would be more productive. I also traded Malkin and Backstrom for rookie defense players to lower my salary cap so i would get more profits. All these changes were done right after the last blog.
Gougeon is another one of my friends i made into a player. To be fair i had them all built with a stat of 81, and some of them have more of a weakness or strenght rather than be all around. Gougeon is a 6'4, 200 pounds center who is not really agile but excells in checks and accuracy.
I also finally found how to get in fights, and 5 fights later found out how to punch!
So the new lines are presented in this order: LW-C-RW.
Not much has happened in defense except that my rookies are faring pretty well.
I also just changed the lines prior to writing this because 3 of my players were on a cold streak.
Gougeon-Koivu-Lecavalier (3 centers on line 1!!!)
Michalek-Turris-Ryan (Turris has been producing steadily)
Dufort-Fraser-Kotalik (Dufort was on the first line but recently got a cold streak)
Sterling-Craig-Okposo (Okposo scored within 20 seconds of being on the team, and has been rather quiet ever since)
Koivu is my Captain, Lecavalier and Komisarek my Assists.
Lecavalier, who had no points before i recruited him, is now in 3rd place with 32 points in the NHL. He is in 8th place for goals with 15, and has 17 assists.
Koivu has had somewhat of a slowdown lately, that's why i sent him back on the 1st line.
He's still first in the NHL for assists with 21 but Malkin and many others are right behind him. He's the second for +/- with a +22.
Gougeon is leading the NHL in Short-Handed Goals with 5 and has an accuracy of 21.57%, the best in the team. Lecavalier has 4 SHG and leads the team in shots on net with 91.
My 2 star defenses, Fistric and Komisarek, have 113 and 102 hits respectively.
And finally, for my goalies, Luongo (who has been very disapointing considering the goals he gave away) has an save percentage of 90.59% and 2 Shut-Outs. The rookie goalie Johnson has a SP of 92.37%!
All and all i've been having much fun with NHL 09, but i realised something about the difficulty levels.
They are not about the level of difficulty your opponents will have. Hard just means it's going to be harder to cope with the stupid A.I. of the players.
The most frustrating thing would be - by far - when an opposing player comes flying to the net, stops right between the two face-off circles, and just sits there. Your players will start trying to pry the puck away from him, tackle him, pokestick him. These, very very very very often, result in an elbowing or charge penalty, and a pokestick gets you a slashing or tripping penalty. Or sometimes 4 players will be on him trying to get the damn puck and all of a sudden he will wristshot your ass into oblivion!
Another annoying thing that happens, partly due to my own stupidity, would be when i get the puck with one of my wingers but i'm in center position, and the center player will skate to his position right in front of me or exactly where i am standing at that time, stopping me in my tracks!
Well, enough bitching for now. I will have some Marvel comics reviewed by next week!
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