Oilers 4 Hurricanes 0

Carolina showed so little fight, so little fortitude that this one wasn't even close. Frankly, this is more along the lines of what I expected before the series began.

I'm almost too mad to write, but I have to do it.

On Saturday, game six of the Stanley Cup finals looked more like that exhibition game between the Red Army and the US National team in friendly play days before the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics. To say that the Oilers were the dominant team tonight would be like saying that my beard looks like crap. They're both understatements.

Awww fuggitaboutit. See you Monday night for the last game of the season. Come on boys, play with some pride and we can live with the results. Tonight was an embarrassment. The Oil beat you up and took your lunch money.

(snip)

Where'd you go Captain Rod Brind 'Amour? Still fiddle fartin' with the puck way too friggin' long, eh Matt Cullen? What's it too rough out there for you "Offsides" Cory Stillman and Ray Whitney? Is that why you all were invisible? Joe Vasicek needed to step up tonight. Well thank you Joe for your one measly shot. You did a marvelous job of grabbing Pronger's sweater after the whistle and looking kind of psychotically detatched. Nice penalty trifecta Bret Hedican. Thanks to eight of you for your one shot on goal each for the whole game. My 75 year old mother-in-law could have snagged the shutout in goal tonight for the Oil-without even having to amp-up her pacemaker.

The Canes didn't just not go for the jugular again, they flat out fell asleep on the hunt. Where was the skating, on which Lavy and Co. prided themselves? Where was ANY SORT of retaliation? If there's anything that royally gets to me right now, it's how the Oil have one-upped the Canes in having a freakin' enforcer. I may not be all that fond of Georges Laraque, but he is the sort of player the Canes are sorely missing.

Wow, as Coluch so eloquently put it in the comments to the last post. Wow wow wow. What a resounding win. This isn't even forcing game seven. This is demanding that it happen.

There are just too many good things that happened tonight to talk about, but I suppose the biggest difference was the first powerplay, when the Oilers finally decided to take this party downstairs and freak the Canes right the fuck out with the down-low play of Hemsky, Samsonov and Smyth. It didn't result in a goal, but it concerned Carolina enough that they pulled back off the point to protect the net, thereby reopening Prongs for the big shot. Not that we needed it tonight; sure we tore it up on the PP, but it was all forwards, alllll niiiight long.

A couple of notes on the crowd during the game:

Can we try and come up with a more inventive chant than "Let's Go Oilers (fuck Carolina!)"?

As much as I love seeing everyone in their Oilers jerseys, can we set out a code of rules for which jerseys are appropriate and which aren't? Let me suggest the following:

Preferable

- The current design (home, away, or third jersey) with the proper name and number of a player currently on the club.
- The 80s jersey (vintage or retro) with the name and number of a player from that era.