MSU 5, Michigan 2

I've got 10 minutes to get my thoughts down before I head to my hockey game. The score could've changed, I don't know. I turned it off after the fifth goal.

That sucked.

I don't know what it is about this team, but they just get off to crap starts when they face MSU. I remember last year, I was really upset that Michigan failed to put out any effort against the Spartans one game--it wasn't that bad tonight, but MSU clearly brings it when they play the Wolverines and Michigan just doesn't live up to their end of the bargain most of the time.

Mitera needs to find his game, quickly. He's been off for a good portion of the new year. It's at the point where I'm hoping that there's nothing wrong that we don't know about, because he seems really off. Hopefully it's just a hockey thing. He made a terrible play early on that led to a great scoring chance. Left his guy wide open on the MSU goal. Then missed a Spartan player coming out of the box and gave up a breakaway. That was in maybe the first ten minutes of the hockey game. That led to my first "Maybe he stole someone's credit card" joke of the night.

We just didn't play smart tonight. Lots of dumb (legit) penalties, the worst of which was Hagelin's checking from behind call while we were already down a man. That led to goal #5 and me shutting the TV off. Uncharacteristic.

Sauer looked like Billy of last year. He couldn't do anything on either of the first two goals, but the third was probably the worst goal he's given up all year and you simply can't do that in a 2-1 hockey game against a rival. The fifth goal wasn't much better.

Winnett missed an easy chance which could've made the game 2-2 heading to the second intermission. He made up for it, kind of, with a gorgeous goal where he dangled through a Spartan, cut in on net and somehow got one in. That's the first time he's shown anything the entire season and he scores this beautiful goal out of nowhere. Very Tyler Swystun of him.

Kampfer was strong tonight. Pacioretty had a nice goal off a good feed from Palushaj. Turnbull looked good up on the top line, at least on the first watch. We had a bunch of chances in the first two periods, just couldn't capitalize on most of them. Rust put one off the bar. We probably had Lerg beat 5 times, but only put one in the net.

Shots were like 27-8 through 2 periods. I think that's somewhat inflated as part of the Lerg For Hobey Finalist campaign, but we definitely carried the play to that point, save two errors by the defense that ended up in our net.

They really need to suck it up and get a win tomorrow. Based on past history against MSU at the Joe it's probably not likely, but they really need to respond to this. Come out and look like you actually want it, guys. This really is pathetic. I feel like every single time we play MSU, I feel the same way whether we lose or tie. MSU clearly has this team's number, and they bring it when these guys get on the ice. Gotta credit them for that.