Try this on your next breakaway...

Okay, this is from a shootout -- not a breakaway -- but it's a great example of leading the goalie one way and directing the puck the other way.

Actually, the thing that impresses me the most about this is Jurco's ability to stop the puck on a dime before performing his spin move and taking the shot. We do some drills involving drop passes in our clinic and let's just say that generally speaking, we're not nearly as good at stopping the puck as is this dude.

Several members of my team have had breakaways in our past few games but with mixed success. The problem is twofold: sometimes we're up against very talented D-men who can chase us down and we usually don't have a plan about what to do should we ever have a one-on-one against the goalie.

So one more thing to add to my to-do list -- work on one move that has at least a tiny chance of working. I'm kind of a lousy skater, stickhandler and shooter -- and even I ended up with a sort-of breakaway in a game last season that I blew when my grand idea was to skate straight at the goalie, wind-up to take a slapshot and then shoot it straight into his body.

How bad was my shot? I could have sworn the ref blew his whistle before the goalie even caught the puck. Yea, that bad.


--S.H.

My growing rap sheet of hockey crimes and misdemeanors

Well I'm closing in on one goal -- and not the kind with a net. I've managed to devote 99.9% of my waking hours to thinking about hockey.

Seriously. In the past two weeks, I had coffee with a lady friend with the barn door wide open for an hour and twice have gone out in public with my shirt inside out. I've also misplaced my ATM card five or six times and had trouble recalling my home address recently -- I've only lived here seven years.

In other words, if I can eliminate the .1% of the time I'm thinking about eating, going to the bathroom and girls, I'll have achieved perfect harmony with the hockey universe.

So why the obsessiveness?

Because my team -- the team I helped organize because I wanted to play in real games -- has started the spring league season 0 and 4. As I mentioned in a recent post, we're not getting butchered. But we have eight guys out of 13 playing in their first ever hockey league and we're not winning.

As for the scores, we've gone down 6 to 3, 4 to 2, 4 to 0 and 5 to 1. Our defense is actually playing fairly well. Our offense is improving and we're taking more shots. But we're still doing enough things wrong to prevent The Hockey Gods from awarding us with a win.

The Domestic Partner came to yesterday's game and shot about 13 minutes of video. With 99.9% of brain activity devoted to hockey I stayed up half the night watching the low-res clips. My intention was to make some notes on how we were doing as a team, but I ended up focusing on yours truly and it was like watching a hockey horror show over and over again.

Let's catalog some of my efforts to rewrite the position of right wing:

•THE CRIME: There I am on the right side of the left face-off circle in our defensive zone. The puck scoots over to me. I know the puck has now entered The Death Zone -- that area in front of our goal -- so I give the puck a nice dainty slap to the left toward the boards. Never makes it there--puck instead goes to a guy wearing the wrong color jersey who actually seems surprised I made such an accurate pass to him. In other words, I didn't even manage to get the puck out of our zone.

RESULT: The other team didn't do much better with the puck and we were able to clear it up the right boards and make a rush on their goal. So my turnover didn't result in a goal against us.


VERDICT: I had the right idea, but the execution was poor and essentially brainless. I should have either taken off with the puck OR taken a split-second to look around for a pass OR for fuck's sake, iced that rubber motherfucker.