B R O A D W A Y***B L U E S H I R T S

OK

So Paul Mara has all of us beat ( he's had his for a few months already )

but is anyone actually signing up for this?

http://beardathon.com/rangers/team.aspx

nice excerpt from todays Blueshirt Bulletin:







wash coach boudreau :
Of course that was after he had already complained about one call he thought he should have gotten. “If you look closely, Alex was interfered with when he tried to backcheck,” he said. “And that’s why he couldn’t catch up -- the guy in the middle of the ice just got in his way.” It’s true that Chris Drury bumped Ovechkin a bit, but he still had a chance to catch up and just quit skating.

Today, Boudreau went back on his word and did in fact sit there (stand there, actually) and cried like a little girl (OK, a not so little girl) about the refereeing. “We took five minors,” he said. “Look at them. Go back and look at them and see how many were deserved." OK -- Kozlov cross-check on Girardi before he can play the puck, deserved. Kozlov hook on Sjostrom -- saved a goal, so what the heck are you complaining about? Deserved. Green hook -- his stick was up and Zherdev went down on what would have been a two-on-one, you think that's a dive? Deserved. Semin crosschecks Callahan in the throat, and that after being allowed to get the first hit in -- deserved. First penalty on Semin, I don't remember that one well enough to comment, but there didn't seem to be any dispute when we first saw it. In fact, two of the calls against the Rangers were obvious dives -- the only tripping when Gomez allegedly took down Semin and Antropov took down Nylander was the hallucinatory kind. And even Boudreau admitted the call on Rozsival was bogus.


After watching Scotty Upshall in the playoffs last year, Callahan did a very good imitation of Scotty Upshall,” Boudreau said of the call against Semin, presumably a reference about embellishment, something Semin doesn’t know anything about (just ask Gomez). “I am frustrated with it,” Boudreau went on. “They talk about the refereeing and then all of a sudden we don’t get a power play for forty minutes, and the call they called on them was, better make a call, because there wasn’t much of a call on that.” Yeah, that’s the ticket -- accuse the refs of giving you a power play on what should not have been a penalty. That’s gonna get them to give you more, right? You'd think a guy who appeared in the movie "Slap Shot" as a Charlestown Chief opponent would know better.

By Pierre LeBrun
ESPN.com
Archive
NEW YORK -- The New York Rangers had an interested observer sitting on the visitor's bench as they took the ice for their pregame skate Monday morning.

Washington Capitals winger Alex Ovechkin was watching the Rangers practice when a Rangers trainer complained to the Capitals. Washington PR man Nate Ewell then asked Ovechkin to leave the area.

"Alex was just looking for a place to relax. He likes being by the ice," said Ewell. "As soon as he found out it made the Rangers uncomfortable, he left."

When asked why the Rangers wanted him to leave, Ovechkin joked: "Because they're afraid of me."

When asked why he did it, Ovechkin joked that he sat there to "tick off" Rangers coach John Tortorella. His answer drew many laughs from reporters.

Tortorella insisted after the skate he had no idea Ovechkin was there.

"Who? Oh, god, this is the first I've heard of it," said Tortorella. "Ask me a question about the game, not that [expletive]."

"I don't think he had a pen and paper and was writing down line combinations," joked Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau. "I can understand [the Rangers asking him to leave]. I've gotten into the same arguments with people when I've wanted privacy in my practice, so I can understand what John was going through."

Pierre LeBrun covers the NHL for ESPN.com.