Back on the grid...

...from which I fell off yesterday.  When I got to work at six, I put the stiffness in my legs and my slowness of step off to it being Friday.  But between 7:30 and 8 I went from okay to WTH and came home at 9.  A large bout of chills, several ibuprofin and two draughts of Ny-Quil later, I'm almost myself other than recouping my strength and working out the stiffness of a day in bed.

Anybody else getting ths annoying "An error occured in trying to publish your post" when you're not trying to publish yet?  Blogger can be SOOOO annoying...

Speaking of which, I came on here to update the playoffs real quick.

On Thursday Kevin Dallman had two scores and Victor Tikhanov had a goal and an assist as St. Pete blasted the Polar Bears 7-0 to take a 2-0 series lead.  Like the rest of the western conference they were off yesterday and will play today.

Red Army also went up 2-0 with another OT win over the Lions, 3-2.  This time Yegor Rylov got the tying goal with 2 and 2 (as Chuck Woolery used to say) to go, and Igor Grigorenko won it halfway through the second OT.

Dynamo had a much harder time with the Sky-Blues of Bratislava second time around, but won in OT 3-2 to also take a 2-0 lead.  Alexi Sopin tied the game at 2-2 early in the second, and it stayed that way for almost 49 minutes of playing time until he scored again 11:46 into OT.

Lokomotiv returned the favor to the Steelers Thursday, getting goals from Daniil Apal'kov and Staffan Kronwall for a 2-1 win and a 1-1 series tie.

The eastern teams played Thursday and Friday.  Canadian goalie Matt Dalton got hammered for 5 goals on 26 shots as the Russian Snow Leopards blasted the Petrochemists 5-1 in game one;  The second game was all about RSL goalie Konstantin Barulin, who posted a 30-save 3-0 shutout to put the Russian cats up 2-0.  The east has their next games on Monday.

Kari Ramo had a 25-save shutout and Alexander Popov had a goal and two assists as the Vanguard pasted Siberia 5-0 in their first game; but it was Jeff Glass, another Canadian goalie in his fourth season in the KHL, returning the favor with a 1-0 blanking for Siberia in game two to even things at a game apiece.

The Meteor guys struggled down the stretch, and things aren't looking better in the playoffs.  The Kazakh Snow Leopards won game one 4-3 when Roman Starchenko (who already had two assists) scored 15 minutes into OT; in game 2, Nigel Dawes, a veteran of 212 NHL games with the Rangers and others, scored a hat trick to lead the Kazakhs to a 5-3 win and a surprising 2-0 lead in that series.

The series everyone is watching out east, though, is SYU and the Metallurgists.  These are the perennial titans of the conference, and their series is reflecting that.  In game one, Metallurg got two quick goals in the first part of period one, but Sergei Zinovyev scored twice in just over three minutes to tie.  They went to OT tied at 3-3 until Alexander Svitov scored just 1:22 into the extra period to give SYU a 4-3 win in game one.  The score was just a crossing pass in front of the goalmouth that bounced off the skate of defenseman Fillip Metlyuk and went in.  The second game former Lokomotiv goalie Georgei Gelashvilli didn't give SYU a chance to be lucky, stopping all 23 chances in a 2-0 win.  Sergei Mozyakin, the league's leading scorer, got one of the two as Metallurg evens things at a game apiece.

Okay, time for me to try to give all your blogs a half-assed perusal before I run out of what's left of my morning energy.  Or I might do it later.   8:44 and I'm ready for a nap already!