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After extensive contract negotiations, the Mighty Pirates organization is extremely pleased to welcome back Howie for another season of insightful, amusing, and extremely addictive commentary! Yes, Howie tells it like it is!

You'll find links to each and every Howie Report right here after each game.

The Howie Report - Game #4
2009-10-19: Mighty Pirates 0 at Ice Demons 9

Another bye week — another really late Howie Report... oh, well, chalk up the extra time to recovering from the shock of the Mighty Pirates (2-2-0) being shellacked 9-0 by the Ice Demons (2-1-1) in the final pre-season game of the 2009-2010 campaign. That game certainly took the wind out of the sails of the Pirate ship, and brought the boys in black and yellow back to earth in a big hurry, where they now sit with a 2-2-0 record in third place, awaiting the outcome of realignment and the rest of the season schedule.

It was also the first game of the season at Ricoh Coliseum, but clearly the bloom is off the rose as far as that experience for the jaded Bucs, since they had to scramble to get just 12 skaters to show up. This half-hearted response might have something to do with the unimpressive 3-7-1 record the Pirates sport in that venue, or it might just be early in the season. In any case, Tim Sturgeon stepped between the pipes to deal with the mysterious absence of Lella (did he have a portend of what was to come?); the two Johnnys (Gallivan and Mutch) played centre; left wingers were L_Klein, Turner and Phillips; right wingers were Bingham, Mandell (back from knee problems for his first appearance in a Pirate uniform in over a year and a half!) and Leggett; and defencemen were S_Klein, Kitchen, Sousa and Jezioranski. Not too shabby a line-up, you might say. But looking at the list of absentees is unnerving — they include regulars Lella (as noted above), Besant, Kwinter, Sager, E_Mintz (even the young ones are having knee problems) and Captain Mola (still sidelined by his bum knee), and subs Brown, Tassone, Siddons, P_Sinclair and N_Sinclair. It is fair to say that there was a lot of firepower missing from those sidelined players!

Kudos to Captain Mola, who still made it his business to come down to the big R to watch his beloved flock take the ice. Indeed, his enthusiasm for the team found him behind the bench on more than one occasion, in stark contravention of TNHC rules, in an attempt to rally the troops as the roof came down on their heads! Kudos also to the Pirate Superfans who paid scalpers outrageous prices to get those coveted seats right behind the Pirate bench and cheered on their favourites, despite their miserable showing on the scoreboard.

Let the fact that Bingham was the only Pirate to make it onto the score sheet — and that only by virtue (or was it vice) of his two penalties (each of which resulted in a Demon goal) — not colour the fact that the Pirates played pretty well for the first period and a half. In fact the score was just 1-0 at the end of the first period, and just 2-0 with 2:13 remaining in the second (one of which was a power play goal). But from then on, despite the obvious fact that the game was well in hand for the Demons, they ran up the score in a stunningly unsportsmanlike manner, adding another goal in the second and five unanswered pottings in the third, for a final score of 9-0. Were it any other team, the Pirates might have been amused, and the fact that the game was largely a clean and non-violent one must be acknowledged. But the type of showy display that the IDs put on can only be properly addressed in one way — relegation to a higher division where these guys can have their clocks cleaned on a regular basis by players better than them, hopefully served up with an appropriate amount of machismo.

Having said all of that, the Pirates did not play well in the second half, even had the opposition been closer to their level of hockey. Pirate Brand Hockey® was nowhere to be seen. The Ice Demon point men were rarely challenged or even perfunctorily covered in the Pirate end, many shifts were overly long, the forechecking was lackadaisical, the backchecking even more dismal — leading to innumerable odd man rushes on the Sturgeonator, who was forced to take it like a man all alone in his crease. He did an amazing job to try and keep the game under control, but it could not have been much fun for him trying to do it by himself. No, it wasn't pretty — and this correspondent hopes that he does not have to see that type of performance again — in this or any other season.

In the meanwhile, the entire TNHC Monday Night Hap Day Division sits in limbo, waiting for True North to publish its realignment of divisions and the schedule for the rest of the season. In 17 years of play, we have never seen an entire division given a week off, nor have we had to wait so long for the final schedule of the regular season to be published. It does make one wonder whether we are witnessing some sort of serious crisis of the magnitude of the Lehman Brothers meltdown just over a year ago, or whether True North is waiting for a government bail-out to continue operations. So, while we wait, PirateHockey.ca continues to show a big question mark where news of the next game ought to be — and the name of the opponent, the date and the time of the next game all remain a big mystery.

The only good news is that there is no other Toronto sports team worth watching, whether live or on television, so Pirate fans sit and wait anxiously to see what awaits their heroes. Stay tuned to your favourite web site for the news, and we will see you at the next game, wherever, whenever and against whomever it will be.

In the meantime,

GO PIRATES!!! VIVEN LOS PIRATAS!!!

Howie