Carnage in Vancouver

Well, I was planning on driving up to Vancouver yesterday to attend the game between the Tips and the Giants, but mother nature discouraged me. For those fans who did brave the road conditions, I salute you — and I sympathize with you for putting in all that effort for such an awful performance. Not being there in person it’s hard to know for sure, but based on the video feed it had a lot of the feel of Game 6 in Prince George last year. I saw one team completely dominating, and I saw the team being dominated not seeming to mind all that much. That’s something the Tips are definitely going to have to fix if they want to make anything out of this season.

As if getting embarrassed 7-0 wasn’t enough, the Tips also had injury added to insult. Steve Ewen of the Vancouver Province fired me an e-mail after the game mentioning that Kyle Beach didn’t come out for the third period and Dan Gendur left midway through the third. John Becanic told Ewen after the game that both were injured, though the e-mail didn’t include any specifics.

Then there was Dane Crowley’s hit on Michal Repik. Hopefully Repik, who was taken off the ice on a stretcher, is OK. I haven’t heard a diagnosis, though Repik reportely was conscious and responsive as he was taken off the ice. Good luck to him.

It’ll be interesting to see what becomes of this in regards to Crowley. I got a chance to see one replay of the hit, and to me it didn’t look a whole lot different from the hit Gilbert Brule put on Ondrej Fiala in the playoffs two years ago, or the hit Justin Falk put on Zack Dailey earlier this season. But then, I only saw it once, and the league may have a completely different viewpoint. If Crowley ends up with a lengthy suspension, and if Beach and Gendur are injured for any length of time, the Tips could be in big trouble.