Canes lose again

On Sunday, the Canes were topped by Nashville to the tune of 4-2.

Erik Cole had an early unassisted goal, and my guy Big Joe Vasicek scored our only other goal mid-way through the second. Unfortunately, Andrew Hutchinson was unable to find his way onto the scoresheet. In fact, he only had one shot on goal.

I listened to most of the first and second periods. Our local Canes station isn't airing pre-season games, and there isn't a station in the network that webcasts, so I had to listen to a Preds webcast. Their guys were actually pretty good, but I just didn't enjoy it the way I enjoy listening to Chuck Kaiton. From what I could tell, the encouraging thing about yesterday was that Mikey C was out there crushing everything that moved. On at least three occasions, I heard the Nashville announcer say "and he's leveled by Commodore". He only took one penalty in his 21 minutes of ice time, and the Preds announcers actually disagreed with that call.

On Saturday, the Canes lost to the Thrashers by the same 4-2 tally. In each of these 4-2 losses, we let in an empty-net goal. Saturday's goals came from Eric Staal (with helpers by Josef Vasicek and Mike Zigomanis) and Chad LaRose (with helpers by Mikey C and Danny Richmond)

Two more pre-season games for us: at Florida on Thursday, and at Tampa on Friday.

With just nine days to go before the season starts, we still need to make a couple of signings. Andrew Hutchinson is still playing without a contract, but he's been so darn impressive, I know they're working hard towards getting him signed and keeping him on the big club. Andrew Ladd's future is still somewhat in question. I think we could use him on the big club, but others think he still needs some time. Either way, he isn't signed yet.

There may be a trade in the works, involving one of our veteran defensemen, but I have no factual basis for this.

Once we get Hutchinson signes, I'll try to create some sort of a stats tracker for him. Jes Gölbez; is so sure that Hutchinson will be less effective in 82 regular season games than he was in the first three pre-season games (8 points), that he's offered the following:

Yep, defenseman Andrew Hutchison of the Carolina Hurricanes leads all scorers with 1 goal and 7 assists for 8 points. I bet a hot dog with cheese that he won't even get 8 points in the regular season.

He's found quite a few takers on that bet.