On Frozen Blog

Head Coach Bruce Boudreau sought an elevated sense of competition for this training camp’s scrimmages, in pursuit of which he inaugurated the Gaetan Duchesne Cup. The team that performs best in Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday’s scrimmages will win it. Today at noon was scrimmage 1, between groups B and C.
It was evident from the outset today that we were in for a different breed of scrimmage relative to previous training camps: B (blue sweaters) and C (white sweaters) skated all out, at a high tempo, were careful with line changes, and hit! Four or five times today Empty Maybe and Mike Vogel and I had our Sunday revival beverages threatened by glass-bashing from thunderous checks. And the mid-game flood was deliberate, heavy on the snow collection and water laying from 30 hard minutes of distinctly competitive and ice-mauling skating.
B-squad was coached by Gabby and Bob Woods, C by Jay Leach and Mark French. The scrimmage had the feel of a real game, except that the officiating was competent.
The scrimmage format: 30 minutes of running time, flood; 20 minutes of running time; 10 minutes of stopped time, final horn.
Some line combos for you: B (Blue) featured what may well be the best line of the three groups — Brooks Laich-Sergei Fedorov-Alexander Semin. B also had Boyd Gordon with Alexander Giroux (a mop-up goal) and Eric Fehr (strong game for him) and Travis Morin centering Donald Brashear and Darren Reid. The top C squad line had Michael Nylander centering Flash on his left flank and Chris Clark on his right. Justin Taylor, Dave Steckel, and Mathieu Perreault also centered lines for C-squad, Taylor often with Dubuc and Kygryshev and Perreault with Francois Bouchard and Stefan Della Rovere. Kyle Wilson also rotated through for the C-squad.
In terms of defense pairings, Mike Green and Shaone Morrisonn went for Leach and French’s C-squad, and were joined by Eric Mestery (impressive) Greg Amadio, and Karl Alzner (strong again) and John Erskine. B d pairings included Patrick McNeill and John Carlson; Sean Collins and Jacub Cutta; and Dean Arsene and Milan Jurcina. Jose Theodore started in net for B-squad, Brent Johnson for C. Holtby and ‘Cheese relieved them, for B and C respectively, after the flood.
On paper, B seemed stronger both in skill and experience, and that played out in the scrimmage, which while requiring an Eric Fehr empty net goal late to settle the matter for good (Blue won 3-1), was well controlled by Gabby’s guys. The Fedorov-Semin-Laich unit was easily the afternoon’s most active and impressive.In fact, Fedorov opened the scoring with about 4;15 left in the first, from a Semin helper. The stanza ended 1-0 in favor of B.
A Brooks Laich blast from the left point early in the second frame was gathered in front of the net by Alexander Giroux and tucked home for a 2-0 lead. But Tomas Fleischmann tallied in tight late in the final frame, with a little over 3 minutes remaining, and the C squad applied a bit of concluding pressure to make it interesting with the goalie pulled. Eric Fehr snuffed out the rally with an empty-netter.
I sought input on the scrimmage’s three stars from Vogs and Corey and Empty, and I appreciated their respective perspectives. But the three-star judgement I offer here is my own, and in truth the good today far outweighed any regular bad.

1. Sergei Fedorov
2. Tomas Fleischmann
3. Eric Fehr