Pleasant Monday to you all - and boy do I mean pleasant. Upper 60s in mid-March? Why not. Being the winter lover that I am it’s sad in a way to see all the wonderland melt away. But under all that snow and ice are a number of fine golf courses just waiting for weekend hackers like yours truly. So I am OK with all of this.

Papa Stensaas here for a quick update. I got to the rink a little early today and only Colton Gillies was on the ice. He yelled to me “You’re going to be bored today!” And I  soon found out why. Just seven of his teammates eventually showed up on skates, and only three coaches (none being Jacques Lemaire). Niklas Backstrom was not among the skaters. Neither was Marian Gaborik. I asked about speaking with Gaborik today, and was told he was not available. I saw Brent Burns, too. But he didn’t feel like talking, either.

Maybe everyone was just too darn eager to get outside … Even assistant coach Mario Tremblay, who called to us sitting in the seats wondering what time it was and ended practice after finding out it was 12:25.

Gillies spent most of the practice working with Mike Ramsey while everyone else worked mostly on quick tape-to-tape passing drills. Ramsey, by the way, said not to read into anything by him working with young Colton. Gillies even acknowledged it really was no big deal. “It’s all about development for me right now,” he said.

Sorry for the lame update, but that’s about what we’ve got for today. After a nice day off, Mr. Russo is back with you again tomorrow.

Finally, thank you for all the warm wishes last week after my daughter Paige was born. I’m working on getting her a pair of skates, but so far the closest thing I’ve found for her tiny feet are paperclips. With dull edges like that, she’ll have to be a goalie. Uh oh ….

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.