There’s just a few days left, until the 21st of May, to get your entry in at See Stanley With Lanny and by doing so, you have a chance to win a trip for you and 3 friends to attend a Stanley Cup Final Game with the mustachioed one, Lanny McDonald. Each entry also gets your name in for the weekly draw of Reebok Hockey Stanley Cup prize packs, and in the home stretch of the playoffs, there will be daily prize packs to be won.

Not only that, I’ll choose at random three people who comment on my site, about any subject, and I’ll send them a prize pack compliments of Scotiabank. (And these prize packs are excellent. See below).

So prizes all over the place. Here, there, and everywhere. What a great world we live in!

Here’s a pic of the Stanley Cup Reebok gear packs that you can win, just by commenting on my blog, on any post, until the 21st.

On Friday, September 19, 1986, the Montreal Canadiens played an exhibition game against the Edmonton Oilers at the Ottawa Civic Centre.  I lived in Ottawa at the time but sometimes, as was the case here, real life gets in the way and I had to work and couldn’t go. Just like the time I had a couple of front row seats for Roy Orbison at the National Arts Centre and was out on a truck run, got back late, and missed that too.

But my buddy Frank and his son Robin went to this Habs-Oilers clash, and brought me back a program.

This was a charity event for the Canadian Cystric Fibrosis Foundation, and two beauty teams went at it that night. Montreal had won the Stanley Cup that previous spring, and boasted Patrick Roy in nets, along with guys like Bobby Smith, Larry Robinson, Guy Carbonneau, Bob Gainey, Chris Chelios, and Stephane Richer.

The Oilers were pretty well in a class by themselves. They had won the two previous Cups, in 1984 and 1985, and the two after, in 1987 and `88, with a lineup of Wayne Gretzky, Grant Fuhr, Paul Coffey, Glenn Anderson, Mark Messier, Jari Kurri etc.

Edmonton won the game that night 8-3, so maybe it was good that I missed it.

Many thanks to Ron Green in Orillia for sending this over.

Things are going as Hollywood producers might hope. Los Angeles on one coast and New York on the other take their openers in their bid to meet each other in the Stanley Cup final.

The Rangers blank the Devils 3-0 on home ice Monday night, and regardless of how well the Devils played, as Glenn Healy kept reminding us, the name of the game is to score goals. You can’t win if you don’t score, and Zach Parise, Ilya Kovalchuk and the rest couldn’t score.

So the opener goes to the Rangers, while Los Angeles, with their 4-2 win the other night against the Coyotes, gets theirs too. It’s never a bad thing to skate away with a game one victory. In fact, it’s a great thing. Much better than losing game one.

The movie studios are considering the cast as we speak.

Los Angeles coach Darryl Sutter win be played by Sean Penn.

While Paul Michael Glazer will take on the role of Rangers coach John Tortorella.

Of course, it’s only game one in what could be two very long series. So if New Jersey and Phoenix end up in the finals, producers are considering Randy Quaid as Jersey coach Peter DeBoer.

And there’s no word yet on who will play Coyotes coach Dave Tippett, so for the time being, I’ll just throw in Nick Nolte.

Is Gomez gone yet?
Gomez who?
Gomez. You know, the guy who never scores?
Oh yeah. Eric Gomez. Plays soccer in Mexico.
No No No. Not Eric Gomez. Scott Gomez.
I’ve never heard of a Scott Gomez playing soccer in Mexico. Is he good?
Not in Mexico. Montreal. And he doesn’t play soccer. He plays hockey.
How come he plays if he never scores?
We don’t know. Thank you for asking.
Is he related to Mario?
Who’s Mario?
Mario Gomez. He’s a soccer player in Germany who never scores.
Never scores? So how come he plays if he never scores?
We don’t know. Thank you for asking.
Asking what?
Is Gomez gone yet?
Gomez who?

Happy Mother’s Day to to all moms everywhere. Moms make the world go round. Even Ma Barker tried hard.

After reading Alvin Karpis’ book “Public Enemy Number One, I now realize that Ma Barker was misunderstood. She was just a poor woman from the Ozarks with a bunch of sociopathic sons, and she never took part in any jobs. When Karpis and Doc and Freddy Barker planned a bank heist or kidnapping, they went out to the car to talk about it. Ma was always left in the dark.

Basically, she was a simpleton.

She eventually got tuned in when she went to the movies with Karpis and Freddy and saw a clip on the big screen about how dangerous and murderous her boys were. But she never stopped being a mom until the day she was cut down by the Feds in a hail of fire.

Moms are like that.

The Washington Capitals are done after losing to the Rangers 2-1 in the seventh game, and you have to think that Alex Ovechkin will probably go his whole career without winning a Stanley Cup. He’s won just about every award a forward could win, but there might never be the Big One. That’s because the Caps, like the Vancouver Canucks, just can’t seem to get it done after enjoying fine regular seasons. Why is that?

But it’s not something I need to dwell on. I’m not feeling bad for folks in Washington. Maybe if they send the Nationals back to Montreal and the team becomes the Expos again, I might have more compassion.

Now it’s the Rangers and Devils, which should save on plane tickets. Were talking bus rides here. The Bus Series. Two teams, separated by the Hudson River and a cement light standard somewhere nearby that’s the longtime home of Jimmy Hoffa.

Only two more rounds to go.

Go whoever.

I haven’t exactly been a faithful watcher of the playoffs so far, but I’ve decided to record the Caps-Rangers seventh game tonight and watch it at midnight when I get home from work. I think it should be interesting, and as a bonus, I’d like to see some serious overtime.

For years, except when the Habs are playing, I’ve hoped for a record breaking 7 periods or more of overtime hockey. The longest game ever was on March 24th, 1936, when Detroit’s Mud Bruneteau scored in the sixth overtime period, 116.50 minutes of extra play, to give his Wings a 1-0 win in game one against the Montreal Maroons, and I want to see something like that. That game ended at 2:25 a.m, and what a beauty it must have been.

That’s what I want to happen. A game that goes until about four in the morning. Most people are asleep in the stands. The players are skating in slow motion. The TV announcer dozes off. All that. Just to make things different. To see history being made.

There’s been some classics over the years. Like these, from SportsIllustrated.com

I watched the ”Theoren Fleury: Playing With Fire” documentary tonight that has Theo taking us back to when he started on his downhill spiral and eventual crash and burn, to the streets of New York where he went crazy with booze, broads, gambling, and lots of lines of coke.

This was a tortured soul, and a guy who wasn’t exactly Ken Dryden or Scrooge McDuck when it came to money. He once spent more than a million bucks during one weekend of debauchery. This is a guy who earned $50 million playing hockey, and is broke today.

As Fleury takes us along the lonely streets of New York, we stop at Madison Square Garden, where he played for three years, and they wouldn’t let him in. We then tag along as Fleury moves to Chicago, where he also played and partied, and at the United Center, he wasn’t let in there either.

It’s a dark film, there are no laughs or upbeat moments, and I suppose that’s why it’s so riveting. Fleury bares his soul, tells it like it was, had few friends on the team, was an unlikeable sort, and hung around with undesirables who happened to have a lot of drugs. His first wife said he was a lousy father, broke promises to his young son, and later when the kid was 16, Theo introduced him to dad’s seedy world. She described seeing her son in this situation like knitting a sweater for 16 years and then watching the wool unravel.

Fleury says he disliked being a contestant on CBC’s Battle of the Blades, that the show was basically scripted and the winner pre-determined, and said he’d never do it again. But he was also a guy who hated to lose, and maybe it’s just a bit of sour grapes on his part. Interesting if it really is scripted though.

He also believes he should be in the Hockey Hall of Fame, and I don’t see why he shouldn’t be.

Theoren Fleury seems tired, ragged, unhappy, with a look of the hard street about him. It’s quite sad when you compare him to other great players whose lives are a bowl of cherries now. He was a star player, a small man who did big things, but the abuse by his junior coach Graham James obviously has taken its toll. He was out of control, contemplated suicide while living in Santa Fe, ended up going to A.A., and it seems this is going to be a long and winding road to recovery for this great player.

Someone on the show said you either love Theo Fleury or you hate him. I have no idea, but I admired him as a player on the ice throughout his whole career. The smallest guy in the league showing that size didn’t matter. He hit, fought, went in the corners, skated like the wind, and collected 1088 points in 1084 games. He really was a great and colourful player.

It’s quite a documentary and well-worth checking out. This is a guy with demons, but he’s working on it.

I can’t believe it. Why do I do things like this?

For some inexplicable reason, I decided to wear my best Habs hat while painting, and now I’ve got white paint on it. Sometimes I’m just so brain dead.

Maybe I can find some gentle paint remover that doesn’t harm material. What was I thinking?