Ice Cold Takes: The GRITMAS Special

Ice Cold Takes is an NHL humor column covering what is trending around the NHL. Here’s to a holiday season as happy as a Flyers fan after anyone named Ron gets fired.

Seeing as it’s the holiday season, everything will have a positive spin on it today. Here’s an example: Instead of laughing at the terrible Montreal Canadiens for losing 4-0 to the far superior Boston Bruins on Monday night, we can just say both teams fought hard and played a good game in front of a spirited NHL crowd!

As you can see, this week will be a little different than usual. There will be no downward trends because it’s the holidays and everyone should be happy. Ice Cold Takes is only positive this week. A special edition column for special edition readers (all six of you are special to me).

Next week will be the second of back-to-back special edition columns, focused solely on the weird world of goaltenders. Be sure to take a vacation from your vacation and check that out as well. If you’re one of the unlucky ones that has to go into work, well, you probably won’t be doing any actual work anyway.

Without further ado, here is your weekly NHL news and analysis.

Trending Up

Western Canadian hockey teams

Turns out Ken Hitchcock might not have been a bad hire after all. The Oilers are 9-4-2 after Hitch decided it would be in the team’s best interest to play Connor McDavid as many minutes as humanly possible. It’s clearly working.

The Oilers are one of three Western Canadian hockey teams that are getting little to no attention due to the frozen hell that is Toronto-based media. Sure, the Leafs are good, but the Flames and Jets are both more complete teams. The Oilers are looking like they could make a nice push as well.

The Winnipeg Jets might be the best team in the NHL. They are 8-2-0 in their last 10 and riding a five game win streak. They’ve played a tougher schedule than Tampa (52 points) and just beat the league’s leading team 5-4 in OT. The Flames are also 8-2-0 in their last 10 and leading their division.

Vancouver, well, things are looking up for you too. Elias Pettersson and Brock Boeser are going to be as good a 1-2 punch as the team has had since Pavel Bure and Geoff Courtnall. No one else since then has been this good. Hey Sedins…

Let’s cap this section off with an official prediction. The Edmonton Oilers will defeat the Winnipeg Jets in game 7 of the Western Conference final to move on to the Stanley Cup final against the Boston Bruins.

Family

Speaking of the Oilers, Edmonton goaltender Cam Talbot’s family gets excited to see him on TV, and it’s absolutely adorable. Family is also the second best part about Christmas (after presents, obviously).

Mother of twins and wife of a goaltender (God bless her), Kelly Talbot and the other wives of the Oilers players (and all teams, for that matter) do a ton of great charity work. They work on this type of stuff tirelessly, not only during the holidays, but throughout the rest of the year as well. If you are in the spirit of giving, check out Kelly’s Twitter feed (or the timeline of any of your favorite NHL player’s wife or girlfriend) and help others in need. ‘Tis the season!

The Carter Hart Era

Christmas came early this year for top goaltending prospect Carter Hart. The future of the Flyers has been called up to be Philadelphia’s sixth starting goaltender of the season. Why not, right? He made 20 saves in his debut 3-2 win over the Detroit Red Wings and earned himself the first star of the game.

The Flyers are once again going through an inexplicably bad stretch. Something this talented team has been known to do from time to time. Thankfully for fans, they cleaned house over the past two weeks and look to be the favorites to land Joel Quenneville whenever he decides his well-earned vacation is over.

Carter Hart

might

will be the next great NHL goalie. Hart finished the 2017-18 WHL season with a .947 save percentage and a 1.60 goals against average with the WHL’s Everett Silvertips. Sure, these aren’t indicative of his stats against NHL talent but give him a few games to adjust and he’ll be fine. He’s probably going to be a household name so best get on this train early.

Not sold on Hart yet? Read this:

GRITMAS 

Revisiting ICT from two weeks back, GRITMAS is almost here! As stated in the previous column, GRITMAS is a new holiday that closely resembles what could be described as Christmas meets Fight Club, but all in good fun! In fact, Gritty is getting into the spirit of GRITMAS by being alive every day and continuously doing things like this:

That clip might have been better than Love, Actually. Are we happy that Rick from The Walking Dead (Andrew Lincoln) is in love with his best friend’s girl (Kiera Knightly) and gets a Christmas kiss from her but upset that Snape (Alan Rickman) likes the receptionist? Aren’t those both bad things? Liam Neeson and the kid from the Maze Runner (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) have a great back and forth though. That part is great. Moving on.

What’s with the fake sex scenes, though, right? What are they doing? Are they porn stars? Actors testing out camera angles? I’m happy that the end up together but I don’t understand their line of work. Good for Colin Firth, though. He and the Portuguese girl are adorbs. Love Prime Minister Hugh Grant as well. Okay. We’re actually moving on now.

Other mascots are starting to take a page out of Gritty’s book, too! It seems like GRITMAS is catching on in Chicago, where beloved mascot Tommy Hawk decided it would be fun to get into a brawl with a fan.

As you can see in the clip, it’s believed that Tommy was acting in self-defense after being attacked by a drunk fan, but we all know the real reason is that these two were participating in GRITMAS! Merry GRITMAS, Tommy and random drunk fan!

Bonus Coverage: Christmas Cards for Carly

We’re skipping the betting this week in favor of something much more worthy of your time. 12-year-old Carly from Weymouth, MA got some news right before the holidays that no one wants to hear. She’s a hockey player, so you know she’s tough enough to get through it, but she could use your best wishes. Please take the time to send her a Christmas card.

Keep your head up, Carly. You got this.

Happy holidays, NHL fans!