Very impressive. Even more so when you realize he’s 9 years old.

That loss lead to the firing of General Manager Doug Armstrong and put President Jim Lites elsewhere in the organization. New Co-GMs Brett Hull and Les Jackson and new President Jeff Cogen seem to have at least cleared the air. The Stars have looked better since then, going on the 6 game streak, and playing a little harder. Modano has finally decided to show up for the season and fight through some checks.

The new management has made a couple of nice moves in getting rid of Fedoruk ( someone we should have never signed ) and bringing up some of the kids that we fans have been hearing about forever and yet have never really been given a chance.

Erikson appears to be making something of his time this time since he’s getting top 6 forward minutes and producing a little bit.

Most of the fan angst I’ve read at this point is our need for a scoring winger. While I agree we need a sniper, I think we also need to be on the lookout for a top notch #1 center. Modano is not that #1 guy anymore. His role now needs to become what Joe Nieuwendyk’s was during the cup runs. A great #2 center, that when not facing the other team’s top checking line can do a lot of damage. Modano still has crazy skills, but he needs to go up against the second best defense.

I also don’t think our defense and goaltending has been the best this year. The defense is making a lot more mistakes, and sadly, it’s not the two rookies making the most of them. For some reason, Daley has regressed a great deal from last year. He’s the one playing like a rookie. Marty Turco hasn’t been playing all that well and Mike Smith is giving up juicy rebounds. They need to tighten things up around the net for sure.

I have no idea where this team might end up, but I’m hoping the current 2 game skid is due more to fatigue than anything ( 6 road games in 9 nights is brutal ) and that once they get a chance to catch their breath they’ll get back to some winning streaks.

As for the playoffs, I think we could finally break into the second round again, but it would be short lived. There are just too many great teams in the Western Conference. I’m just hoping the Stars surprise me.

At least this game didn’t remain the blowout it was becoming. I’m also glad that Morrow came back. That was a nasty spill he took. I’m guessing he broke his nose.

And I’m guessing it’s going to be another year of the Comeback Kids. I just wish the Stars would play with the urgency throughout the game as they do when they are down by a couple of goals in the third period.

For those that can’t tell, I’m going to try and blog about the season as it goes along. I’ve got a ticket to the Home Opener on Friday and I’m just sure the Stars can beat Boston….right?

And that includes my beloved Dallas Stars. They had a heartbreaking first round loss to those pesky Vancouver Canucks, but I’m hoping for good things this year. Not many people are seeing the Stars have success based on the fact they had some terrible offense during the end of last year and didn’t make any significant offseason moves.

It got me thinking about the beginning of last year. Before the injury bug hit, the Stars offense was clicking and we were 11-2. Then Steve Ott got injured and we lost the heart of the energy line. Then Modano and Morrow went down and the offense never really recovered, even when they came back. The rhythm wasn’t there.

So I think that gives hope to this year’s team. Most everyone is healthy, except for Mike Ribeiro ( who was our top scorer ) but he should be back in about a week, and I’m thinking this might be the year for some of the younger guys to break out. I’m also hoping that maybe one day the coaches will allow a little more offensive creativity at the expense of defense and let Turco clean up any mistakes. As both Mike Heika and The Razor have said, “You only need to score more than your opponent, even if that means 6-5″.

I’m a little disappointed Chris Conner didn’t make the team to start the season since he was the highest scorer for the Stars in the pre-season. I’m betting he’s the first call up if there’s an injury to a forward.

So here’s the start of another hockey season! It will be great taking it all in! ( Did I mention I got Center Ice this year? That’s all the hockey games every night! )

Warm Ups	Dallas Stars’ Bench
Mike Modano	Faceoff!
Some live game action

The Stars won the game against the Wild, but lost to Detroit. Both nights were awesome either way because of the great vantage point. Nothing like seeing the players’ eyes darting around looking at the play. Just amazing!

Pics in no particular order:

Joe Thorton in the most acurate shot contest	The All-Stars just hanging out
Blackhawks Mascot	East Young-Stars
Islanders Mascot	Penguins Mascot
Thrashers Mascot	West Young-Stars
Young-Stars game action	Young-Stars final score ( East 9 – West 8 )
Young-Stars post-game	Pre-game scoreboard for Young-Stars game

Immediately my allegiance switched to the “new” team. I finally got to go to my first NHL game in the fall of 1995. If you really, really dig deep, you can find a column I wrote about the experience in my college (at the time) newspaper. And once you’ve seen a live game, it gets just that much better. Ask my in-laws, they went to a single game two seasons ago and were hooked enough to watch the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Since about 2001 there have been grumblings about the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) expiring in 2004 and how it would be “Armageddon”. Both sides could have been working out their issues since then, but instead of talking, September 15th, 2004 came along and the owners locked the players out.

The league wants what it calls “cost certainty”, which basically means some sort of salary cap on the players based on the revenues the league generates. The players will have none of that and want a luxury tax system that makes teams that spend over a certain limit pay fines for doing so.

So now it’s a bunch of millionaires fighting a bunch of billionaires, which makes me and most of the rest of the country wish they had these guys’ problems. Yeah, I know not all of the players in the NHL are super rich, but even with a league minimum of $250K per year, they are certainly doing better than most of America.

I’ve thought long and hard about this, and I think I’ve finally decided I’m with the owners on this one. Some would say that it’s the owners that have put themselves into this position, which is partly true. But when they have to bid against each other for Free Agents and that artificially drives up the price since each team wants to win (although only one will win it all every year) and thinks they have to have all the “best (read: more expensive) players. So that’s why some 3rd line center can pull down more than $1 million a year.

The thing that really puts me on the side of the owners is that these players don’t seem to understand how little importance their sport and league play on the American Sports Landscape. Basically, hardly anyone on radio or print (outside of Canada) even talks about Hockey, unless it’s the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and there was some major controversy, it gets a highlight on SportsCenter, right after the bajillion, and insignificant, summertime baseball scores. Hell, there might even be NFL news before Stanley Cup news. That’s pretty far down the line to me.

And the way things are going, if the leagues stays off the ice for the year (which it looks more and more like it’s going to do with the weekend deadline set by the league), I think they will lose a great deal of fan base, especially in the newer cities like Atlanta and Nashville (although Nashville did finally make the playoffs for the first time last season, so there’s hope there). This will have a fairly drastic affect on league revenues and further erode the amount of money to pay the players and other personnel. You can’t truly believe you can spend over 75% of revenues for players and still make the investment worth it for the owners.

The players also seem to be all about the money, even though not one of them will tell you that. It’s not about the game, if it was, these guys would realize how good they have it and would be playing for peanuts, like the MLS guys do now. They say they won’t play under a cap. Well guess what, the two leagues generating the most revenue and having a lot of success are the NFL and the NBA (you may have heard of them) and they each have cost containment. The NFL has a hard salary cap with a lot of rules, and the NBA has a very harsh luxury tax system.

For the players it comes down to realizing that there’s a limited amount of money, the owners are in it to make money too, and to just be damn happy to get paid to play a game for a living.

Hunter Smith

I guess it’s good to see people from my small home town make it somewhat big.