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I'd like to take the final 6:00 minutes of hockey from the Ducks/Blackhawks game on Wednesday night and bottle it into a drink that I could sip from and experience everyday for the rest of my life. Of course, that emotional range of extreme pressure, excitement, worry, nervousness and overwhelming spikes of joy would probably give me a heart attack before I'm 40, but there is a price for glory dammit!
Contracts!
Initially I was very excited when Ryan Getzlaf signed his extension. I thought 8 years would be a long time and $66 million is a heck of a lot of money. I feared there would be no "room" left for Corey Perry on the payroll - but I didn't really think that would matter as I expected him to test the market anyway.
And then, Monday night, I found my hands surprisingly up in the air celebrating the news of Perry and his own 8 year deal worth slightly more than his buddy. I guess that's what an MVP trophy buys you - a few extra hundred thousand a year. Anyway - I was, and still greatly am, thrilled that these two powerhouses will be in Ducks jerseys for the next 8 seasons. Getzlaf has proved that he is and can be a great leader for this team and Perry is clearly a vital ingredient for any offense threat the Ducks posses. Let's just say that game on Wednesday might not have gone to the wire like that if the Ducks had the Perry-quotient.
We aren't going to know the true value of these deals for some years to come. I think the next four will be exactly what we hoped they'd be from these two...the following four might be a bit more questionable.
The heart of a hockey player
If you don't like Andrew Cogliano after Wednesday's game - you're an idiot. Sorry, but that's just how it is. Hell, even if you aren't a Ducks fan, the final moments of that Ducks game should have made you like Cogliano just a little more than you've ever expected. To see a player get CLOBBERED with an opponents stick, hit the ice, writhe in pain, watch referees and teammates pick up teeth off the ice...and then see that SAME player on the ice in the midst of the action minutes later...was INCREDIBLE. Once I began to see the pictures of Cogliano's face and crazy vampire smile, I couldn't help but feel some extreme gratitude that the Ducks are lucky to have a dedicated player like that on their roster. Add in some bad ass penalty killing and feisty forechecking mentality to his game and I'm quickly becoming a big Cogliano fan.
Cogliano wasn't the only player to make a splash that night. While driving home from the game, I began to get a series of tweets about Getzlaf having the flu. I'm sorry, you mean the guy, the one who turned on the gears to overdrive (in the final moments of a game the Ducks had very little business of winning based on their AWFUL third period play) and made two of the greatest plays of the night - THAT guy was sick with the flu? Incredible. Sign me up for 8 more seasons of THAT guy!
GO DUCKS!!!