Chirps from Center Ice

Went to WBS practice today up on Coal Street and caught some of the practice along with the scrimmage. Click through for more, please!

Practice went to about 11 am. It focused on wall play and odd man situations. I’m not going to bore you with any details I probably will get wrong, just because I have never been to enough of these things to intelligently say anything about them. The goalies on the ice at the time were Patrick Killeen and Brad Thiessen. Head Coach John Hynes ran the practice, flanked by his assistant Alain Nasreddine and Pittsburgh assistant Todd Reirden. There was a man working with the goalies, whom I later found out to be Pittsburgh goalie coach Mike Bales.

Scrimmage commenced. Teams were split, black and white coached by Reirden (Team Black) and Bales (Team White) I actually brought a pen and paper and scribbled down these lines:

Team Black:

Tangradi – Smith – Bennett
Gibbons – Peters – Thompson
Veilleux – Manderson – Payerl

Reese – Despres
Strait – Samuelsson
Grant – Mormina

Only three lines. Tom Kuhnhackl rotated in as an extra forward. Defensive pairings shifted at times in the scrimmage, but for the most part remained as they were. I did see a line of Veilleux – Gibbons – Thompson at one point.

Team White:

Uher – Sill – Holzapfel
Dupuis – Megna – Ferriero
Zurvinski – Chupp – Neal

Bortuzzo – Morrow
Dumoulin – Sneep
McNeill – Morrow

Same as Team Black. D rotated. Lines did too.

Goalies rotated too, but here’s where confusion set in for me, Killeen and Thiessen tended opposite nets in the same black jersey.

The Penguins played two twenty minutes halves on a consecutive clock. Keven Veilleux scored in the first half off of what looked like a rebound or as a result of him crashing the net.

Philippe Dupuis scored in the second half off of a play that shouldn’t have counted as the play appeared offside, or there was a hook that caused the offside which led to Dupuis getting the advantage of scoring. No idea.

Zach Sill was awarded a penalty shot when he was hooked, but was unable to score on Jeff Zatkoff.

Ending in a 1-1 tie, the scrimmage was decided via shootout. I took video of the successful shootout attempts. Figured you’d only want to see the ones that counted, here they are:

Brian Gibbons for Team Black:

Jayson Megna for Team White:

Adam Payerl for Team White:

Thiessen was in goal on the right side and Killeen in goal on the left.

Other random pictures:

Always read about rookies picking up pucks post practice, never saw it till today.

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Panoramic view of the Ice Rink at Coal Street – left click and select “Open Image in New Tab” for a better look.

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Other news:

–> Regular season tickets to WBS games go on sale this Friday.

–> Washington Capitals head coach Adam Oates will serve as co-coach with Hershey’s Mark French until the NHL Lockout ends. Tim Leone tweeted today that Oates’ stay as co-coach will be revisited in two week increments.

–> Wheeling has ice.

–> Norfolk signed journeyman Kendall McArdle to a tryout contract.

I won’t be making the trip to Rochester tomorrow. As you know, the game will not be on radio, but I asked Mike O’Brien if he will be tweeting updates from there and he told me he would. I don’t even know if I will have a recap on here afterwards, other than a passing mention of who did what. Stay tuned, I guess.