The last Musketeer

So... Cechmanek went to Linköpings, Langkow landed at HV71, leaving one last piece of the puzzle of the Swedish Goalie Exodus: Holmqvist's replacement. Today Brynäs filled that gap with fellow World Championship goalie Robert Kristan from Slovenia. Since Slovenia isn't the hockey Mecca that Sweden and Finland are, there isn't a whole lot of information available (in English anyway) out there. Eurohockey.net (where I get most of my information, bless that site!) has the history of the clubs he's played for, but not so much as far as stats. He did play all 6 games for Slovenia in the WC, but unfortunately had a far from stellar record: 0-4-2, 3.81 GAA, .887 save percentage. I hate relying solely on numbers, because they only tell part of the story. I don't know enough about Slovenian hockey to know if the team he had in front of him had as much to do with that record as he did. I'm venturing to guess it was a group effort failure- just look at Norrena in Finland, who played the same amount of WC games and came out with a 1.11 GAA and .950 save percentage. Norrena's good, there's no doubt about that, but the Finnish team was great too. They took the bronze... Slovenia didn't make it to the semifinals, much less the medal round.

Anyway... eurohockey.net also reports that Montreal Canadiens winger Niklas Sundström is headed back to his homeland, to play for MoDo, where he played from 1991-1995 before coming to the NHL. The Canadiens website doesn't seem to mention it- maybe it's too new. Or maybe I got distracted by the message board banter about Huet and his contract (or lack of one). He'll be an unrestricted free agent this summer, so who knows where he will end up.

And last but not least, I was happy to see Markkanen in net tonight for the Oilers, but it killed me to see the outcome. Mind you, I am rooting for the Hurricanes, but I'm a sucker for a goalie story, and Markkanen's a former Ranger, and I wanted to see him do well. And frankly, I think he did play very well, despite the score. He had no chance on a lot of those goals, and didn't get a whole heck of a lot of help from his team mates, in either offense or defense. They took so many penalties I thought I was watching a Ranger game!