I have been going to more Flyers games lately because it’s tough to get rid of the tickets any other way.

The good news is that I’m at a hockey game. The bad news is that I’m at a hockey game in the new NHL. Has nothing to do with the way the Flyers are losing. This new league just plain stinks. Men’s league club hockey at its best. Hockey with no heart.

Anyway, couple points of irony last night. The Flyers announced plans at the game to celebrate some milestone of Alexi Zhitnik next week for 1,000 games played in the NHL or something like that. Meanwhile, during the game, he is traded to Atlanta. Only in Philly.

A number of Leaf fans walking around barrel-chested after the win. Easy there, eh? Any other team played the Flyers last night and they would have scored 15 points against them. The Leafs look to be the better of the worst teams but they are going nowhere fast in April. They were not impressive.

Flyers have some gimmick now where they take 4 kids and line them up on the ice for when the Flyers come on the ice. I think it’s called the High Five club. Flyers come out of the tunnel and step onto the ice and give these kids a high five. When it was first introduced a few months ago, no one told the players to high five the kids, so the kids just stood there with their hands up high and the players whizzed past them thinking “Jesus Christ. What the hell are those kids doing on the ice and why are their hands raised? I almost ran them over.”

Since then it looks like someone in the Flyers has let the players in on their vital role in this marketing scheme and everybody looks to be on board.

Funny though: parents can request that their kids be part of the High Five Club. I guess some parents will do anything … thinking involved or not. Two of the four kids on the ice last night could barley stand on their skates and were clinging onto the boards for balance on the way to and from the ice. Note to overzealous-attention-seeking parents: make sure your kid can skate before you parade them in front of 15,000 Philly fans. Who knows what would happen if one of them wiped out.

It’s Philly. Chances are, it wouldn’t be pretty.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 25th, 2007 at 9:17 am and is filed under Bully's Perspective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.