Christmas break comes early?

Published 3:41 pm Tuesday, September 29, 2009

As most of your I’m sure are aware, Everett is currently in the midst of a 10-day break. That’s right, the season is less than two weeks old and already the Tips are getting a long breather.

This is not normal.

Everett has never had a break this long in its seven-year history, with the exception of the Christmas breaks. In fact, this break is longer than the Tips’ Christmas break this season. When this 10-day break began, the Everett’s season was just nine days old.

What happened?

Well, I tracked down Tips director of business operations Zoran Rajcic today to get the scoop. He pointed to two main culprits:

1) The home show. The home show takes over Comcast Arena this weekend, and it was already being set up today, meaning the entire week was unavailable for home games.

2) The Lethbridge Hurricanes. Lethbridge’s building is undergoing some renovation during the start of the season, so the Hurricanes decided to schedule an unusually early trip through the B.C. Division, making for an odd number of teams playing in the Western Conference this week.

Then when you add in the pre-scheduled dates between B.C. Division teams, along with the fact U.S. Division teams don’t like Sunday games during the NFL season, and you end up with a lot of practices.

The Tips are holding hard practices this week to try and compensate for the lack of game time. We’ll have to wait until next Wednesday against Portland to see if it works.