Phantoms at Hartford: Second Period

I had a bit of a streaming interruption, causing me to miss the first few minutes of the period. No sooner do I bring the game back up then we're stuck in our own end again. Gah! We need to get ourselves in the opposing end for a while.

With the teams 4 on 4, Downie's hustle cancelled an icing call. Nice job, especially considerng he's playing on a bum knee.

OH, Matsumoto had a fantastic chance on a blast from the slot but a Pack player managed to deflect it wide. Rats, that would have been a darn nice shot.

Now, with 5:09 remaining in the second period, Hartford is about to get penalized because someone REALLY rocked Kalinski. We're getting four minutes of PP time because the high-stick drew blood.

I didn't realize. until the announcers just said it, that we are fourth in the league on the PP. Nice. And, in fact, we have done better on this PP than some others in cycling and controlling the puck. OH we have had a couple of nice chances so far. We missed on one stuff attempt on Wiikman's glove side, and on one hit post that trickled the puck to the goalie instead of going in. This is what we have to do a lot more of, so I'm glad to see it.

Again Giroux is creating chances at the near post, but so far he hasn't been able to pot a "clean up the garbage" tally. We're hearing a lot of rookies' names during this extended PP, including Giroux, Raduns, Ratchuk, DeSantis. Matsumoto did his share of creating opportunites, also. Again, we didn't score, but just seeing us create these scoring chances is a step up from what we've done in recent games.

The second period is now over, and the Phantoms still trail 1-0. However, we are now outshooting the WolfPack, 20-18, no doubt because of the number of shots we took during that extended PP.