The Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

When it rains it pours apparently.
Bryan Muir - Broken Ankle, out indefinitely
John Erskine - Broken Ankle, out indefinitely
Shoane Morrisonn - Flu, out until after X-Mas

So the Caps recalled Jeff Schultz, played one game with 5 d-men, and then recalled Lawrence Nycholat, making his Caps debut (entirely too late, IMO). I don't know if Nycho counts as an emergency call-up (thus exempting him from waivers), but he's expected to play tonight.

The Caps D-Corps tonight, complete with NHL career experience:
Pothier 216 games
Heward 333 games
Eminger 155 games
Green 55 games
Nycholat 9 games
Schultz 1 games

Total games: 769 games.

For reference, tonight's opponent, the Maple Leafs, have a combine 3,000 games of experience among their top six, with one player (McCabe) having more experience than the entire Caps defense combined.

In other news, Visor night was a success, and you can see me in the video here.
Video is courtesy of washingtoncaps.com.
I'm in the retro Stevens jersey. The event was mentioned on the Caps broadcast, on ESPN, on the Caps broadcast, and in the Washington Post and Washington Times print editions. Here's a video about it on You Tube, where they did interviews with the other two organizers, but no one felt like interviewing me, apparently. Good job guys. Now if only the team could actually win when we pull something like this.

Ask FS! Will be around later today for the Toronto/Caps game. Until then, everyone go out and get your X-Mas shopping finished, and get out of my way. I have one thing left to buy!

Sorry there's been no posts recently, but I've been trying to help publicize "Marty Sunglasses Night" or whatever we're calling this thing, and I spent almost my entire day off yesterday Christmas Shopping, or at Caps practice, or seeing "Agents of Good Roots" in concert. So I'm beat.

As far as tonight's action, the plan is that one should show up between sections 104 and 105 around 6:30, so that we can all be in place when the Devils come out for warmups. If you donated money, great. There should be some shades reserved for you. If you did not donate money, there should be some extra shades, but bring your own just in case. Heck, I bought 60 pairs, but I plan on bringing my own shades so there's plenty to go around.

The press has gotten on board a little with this. Dan Steinberg, official post sports blogger, has mentioned it in his daily media wrap up, the last couple of days. Elsewhere on the post front, Tarik El-Bashir told me he'd mention it in his blog, but no sign of it yet. Dave Faye had something about it in Wednesday's paper.
The word is still going strong over on the Caps' boards.

So what are Devil's fans saying about all of this? Well, in addition to the usual comments about the Caps being hicks we get unbelievably stupid comments like:

"I can't blame Marty from putting his foot down when it comes to yet another stupid rule (probably designed with the intention of "generating more offense.")"

Well, bad grammar aside, someone missed the whole point completely. Marty went to the NHL and complained about ONE PLAYER'S VISOR. The league changed the rules to punish that one player.

Of course, then there's the other types of comments one would normally associate with a team from NY:

"Your starting to sound like the guy that said here lets all drink this kool aid in a mass suicide, and then your the only one that drinks it. Because not only is your idea fuking stupid. Its going to go down in flames, and no one will even care. "

"I'm sure you'll all be touching each other too."

I cry for the metropolitan NY area. I really do.