Lightning & Edmonton Oilers practice

I wandered over to Lightning practice again today. It wasn't a long practice, but it was a good one, I think.

Other than the poor passing, that is. In a way, I guess it's good to see that it's not just a game thing, but simply a team thing. Passes were too far ahead of guys, or in their skates, or bouncing off of their sticks. They were working on breakout passes, too, so this was all either in the neutral zone or just at the blue line of the offensive zone. Either place, and you're looking at getting picked off or an offsides penalty.

They've been doing that all season long, too - that's the sad part. I think it's a combination of things, but mostly I think that a lot of the team just aren't that aware of where they are on the ice in regards to everything else. They get a lot of icing calls when they shouldn't, some offsides calls, but not a lot of too many men on the ice calls - so they are pretty aware of the bench area, I guess.

In my mind, I think you need to be aware of the blue lines and your teammates, at the very least, followed by the center line, the other team, and the bench - in no particular order. They seem to be focusing almost exclusively on what they need to do as opposed to where they are and what they need to do. That's fairly clear since they set up on the same side every single time on the powerplay and rarely leave that side at all during the powerplay - or any offensive play, for that matter.

I was standing at center ice, next to a door in the rink, and part of the practice Coach Tortorella was right in front of me. I really wanted to crack open the door and let him know what I was seeing, but I didn't think he'd really appreciate that much. It's hard to tell whether a coach has a sense of humor about that kind of thing sometimes, so I decided not to take the chance. Frankly, I would've enjoyed sitting there talking about hockey with the man, but that's the way it goes.

I was also thinking, as I was watching hockey practice, that there aren't many places to watch practice where you can really enjoy it. You can't see the corners standing on the glass at center ice, you can't see past the players if you stand in a corner, and you have to deal with flying pucks and the noise of pucks hitting the glass when behind the goalie. Personally, I think the best place to be would be sitting on the bench, so I can also hear what's going on. But somehow, I don't think that would go over very well, either.

Edmonton had an optional practice, so there weren't many guys there. I watched it for about 10 minutes before heading out. It wasn't that exciting since they were just doing shooting drills.

Speaking of hockey, I realized today that the All-Star game is on Versus - a channel I don't get. I'm not very happy about that, but what can you do? I'll look into heading to a sports bar maybe. We'll see how that goes, I suppose. You'd think I'd be used to that since I get probably only half of the regular season Tampa Bay games televised, but even that still makes me cranky.

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