The weekend that was, and not the circus AGAIN?

Thursday:

GOALS	1	2	3	Total
DRUMMONDVILLE	2	0	1	3
VAL-D'OR	0	1	1	2

Drummondville: Goals by Archambault, Brouillard (the forward) on a penalty shot, and Verrier. Brouillard (the defenseman) finished with two assists.
Val-d'Or: Goals by Zlobin and Mantha. Zlobin finished with a goal and an assist (second star). With his GWG, Verrier was first star for Drummondville.

POWER PLAY
DRUMMONDVILLE	1 / 6
VAL-D'OR	0 / 3

Meh.

Louis-Philip Guindon made 26 of 28 saves while François Tremblay made 24 of 27. Guindon was the game's third star.

Friday:

GOALS	1	2	3	Total
DRUMMONDVILLE	2	2	1	5
ROUYN-NORANDA	2	0	2	4

What?

Drummondville: Hat trick for Torok le Taureau (nickname copyright @Jerome_Berube). Archambault and Caouette with the other goals.
Rouyn-Noranda: Andrighetto, Dea, St-Cyr and Kamaev each had tallies for the home team. Dea added an assist.

POWER PLAY
DRUMMONDVILLE	0/6
ROUYN-NORANDA	1/3

 This makes more sense.

Guindon (that guy again) saved 35 of 39 pucks, third star once more. Torok was obviously first.

Sunday:

GOALS	1	2	3	Total
QUÉBEC	1	1	1	3
DRUMMONDVILLE	0	1	1	2

Aww.
Quebec: Shea, Shaw (who assisted as well), Carrier.
Drummondville: Brouillard (the defenseman) and Verrier.

POWER PLAY
QUÉBEC	1 / 4
DRUMMONDVILLE	2 / 7

 Oh, okay.

Guindon (!) made 11 of 14 saves, and was named first star this time. Wait. What?

Also, it was the Pink in the Rink game highlighting October as Breast Cancer Awareness Month:

I have more photos from this game, and a game report.

Next:

WEDNESDAY NIGHT
DRUMMONDVILLE	7-6-0-0
HALIFAX	12-1-0-0

Not these guys again!

Atlantic road swing upcoming (Halifax, Cape Breton, Cape Breton), which means don't forget (if you're reading this from somewhere in Quebec), the games start an hour earlier than usual.

Riendeau in Stockton: Former Voltigeur Yannick Riendeau signed with Stockton of the ECHL, who also once had a Kelly Cup MVP in their midst but let him go...so that he could become the Kelly Cup MVP. Oops.

Speaking of Scotty: He goes by Scotty now, according to my ECHL app, and has gotten off to a good start in the Central Hockey League. Two goals in his first game, and a shootout goal in his second. Also in the Central, Bloomington split their two games and P-O Pelletier was in net for both, making a combined total of 56 saves.

Jake Allen has quite the memories of Drummondville: Apparently the weirdest thing he ever signed was a pizza box, with the pizza still in it. Maybe it was that instead of the flu that resulted in the infamous ice-sickness incident...

So nobody ruined the circus.

...But they did try, so there is that. And this happened today:

Buts
1. DRU Bryce Milson, (3) (Guillaume Gauthier, Charles-David Beaudoin), 1:01
1. DRU Marc-Olivier Brouillard, (4) (Jérôme Verrier, Jordan Murray), 11:10 (AN)
1. DRU Olivier Caouette, (1) (Jérémy Auger, Andrew Tessier), 16:26
2. VIC Jean-Francois Leblanc, (2) (Petr Sidlik, Mathieu Ayotte), 5:13 (AN)
2. VIC Philippe Maillet, (3) (Tommy Veilleux, Philippe Halley), 11:31
2. DRU Jordan Murray, (3) , 16:33
2. DRU Jordan Murray, (4) (Bryce Milson), 19:42 (AN)
3. VIC Philippe Maillet, (4) (Carl-Antoine Delisle, Angelo Miceli), 5:39 (AN)
3. VIC Angelo Miceli, (5) (Phillip Danault, Tommy Veilleux), 19:00

5-4 W. So there is that as well.

If you haven't already, check out my pictures from the Halifax game!

Alum-roundup: Tonight the McGill Redmen men's hockey team took on the Carleton Ravens (pictures from this game will eventually surface as well). They won 6-4, and Ryan McKiernan would have had two goals but one was stolen from him by........Jonathan Brunelle. They were first and second star, respectively, and Marc-Olivier Vachon was all up in the assists and faceoff categories. Also J-P Mathieu and Benoit Levesque were there and the latter had a goal, yes, you get the picture, ex-Voltspalooza.

Elsewhere in the CIS, Remi Blanchard (U de Moncton) took on Marc-Antoine Desnoyers (UNB) and the former's team came out the victors this evening. Blanchard himself picked up a pair of assists. Meanwhile, Olivier Donovan scored in a losing cause for UQTR as they fell 6-2 to Ottawa.

Raman Hrabarenka didn't take long to get his first AHL point (assist), just 8 minutes, 18 seconds. Albany lost, though, 2-1. Former Volts' goaltender Jake Allen was unfortunate enough to take part in a 6-2 Peoria loss to Abbotsford. For their part, Adirondack and Sean Couturier had a better night. Couts took home first star honours in a 6-3 win over Portland (1 goal, 1 assist, six shots on goal). The Hamilton Bulldogs snuck out a 4-3 win in a shootout which Gabriel Dumont contributed to with a goal. Fred St-Denis was a +2. Mike Hoffman got an assist on the game-winning goal for Binghamton against Wilkes-Barre/Scranton. Ondrej Palat got an assist as Syracuse beat Hershey, 4-3.

The only ex-Drummondville player on an official ECHL list, Mr. Bouvet-Morrissette, was not on Cincinnati's starting roster this evening. The C(entral)HL is still in exhibition and the Bloomington Blaze counts Pier-Olivier Pelletier in its lineup while the Allen Americans have both Scott Howes and Andrew Randazzo in their ranks. The Denver Cutthroats (!) have one Takuma Kawai as part of theirs.

The LNAH was also full of ex-Volts doing productive (and penalty-productive) things, but I should have a whole post dedicated to that in the near future. Maybe.

Enough information you didn't need? Good!

The Circus

Instead of being pessimistic about Wednesday night's loss against Sherbrooke (that I totally called because teams with no wins tend to reverse that fate against teams I choose to blog about), I have decided to move on.

To the circus.

Yes! The circus: Not the actual circus, just a perpetual one with green-and-red tents even though it's not as close to Christmas as some store-fronts would have you believe (dear God. It's not even Halloween yet. Calm down already). The one with a moose on it as imposing as the stuffed animals in several Canadian souvenir boutiques, except this time they're actually a team to be reckoned with so maybe we should be a little scared. Draw some frown lines on that moose. They're ready!

(How apparent is it that I have not had coffee all day?)

Anyway. Starring ring-leader MacKinnon!

(Stop, hammer time?)
The keeper of the cage, Zachary Fucale:

Normally the lion would be in there but he's injured:

Careful bro, he'll totally rip your head off.

Quit judging my use of Photoshop (my sincere apologies to Jonathan Drouin). I only have an hour, here.

TVA Sports tried to be nice to us by headlining Ringleader and Archambault in their tweet, but when you click on the link, you quickly realize that tonight is not even remotely about Les Voltigeurs de Drummondville, it really is about the circus that has come to town. They will spin circles and amaze their audience and feed the media a ton of lines with their feats of glory!...But maybe, hopefully, somebody will ruin the circus.

Somebody wearing red and black.

For my first game back at the Centre Marcel Dionne in over two years, somebody wearing red and black better ruin the circus.

Okay, but seriously: Maybe I better feed you some numbers instead of my ridiculous analogies.

Halifax: 7-1-0-0, 14 points, second in the league (not sure why, they're dead-on with Quebec), 42 GF, 20 GA, 5-game winning streak, MacKinnon and Drouin each have 15 points in 8 and 7 games respectively, Fucale has a 2.25 GAA with a .901 SV%.

Drummondville: 4-4-0-0, 8 points, 10th in the league, 20 GF, 24 GA, just handed Sherbrooke their first win in franchise history, Archambault has 7 points in 8 games, Graham stands at 3.07 GAA and .867 SV%.

Head-to-head: Drummondville lost all three games against the Moose last season, the worst of which was their last: 6-2 on January 12th in Halifax. The others were by one goal, 4-3 and 2-1 respectively.

Alum-news?: I wish. Nothing of note that I can remember happened since the last post. If I'm wrong, let me know in the comments!

Stilts is a star

I think I'll start off by saying positive stuff, since I just recapped the Habs who--shockingly--didn't entirely screw up their Western swing last week.

The thing with the Q this year is that only one team gets screwed out of the playoffs. So with that perspective, even the Habs would make it despite not being anywhere close to deserving of it if that system was applied to the NHL (technically they'd also have to disperse a team a la Lewiston, and don't say Phoenix is the obvious choice because I will not hesitate to get violent with you). Well, because I do bring a certain brand of tough love with them, the same can be said for my Volts, but that being said, there is a particular bright spot that doesn't always get enough attention.

Except Jonathan Habashi beat me to it, because he's smart like that. But yes, André Bouvet-Morrisette.

(I can't show you his abnormally happy-looking headshot because I don't have photo rights and I don't want to get in trouble. But if you go to the Journal L'Express' link up above there you can see it.)

I call him Stilts for short because let's face it, his real name is a mouthful. He even shortened his Twitter handle to @47mo because he's probably aware of that fact. "Stilts" comes from the fact that the last game I went to at the CMD (which was all the way back in September of 2010, woe is me) I snuck down to front row and was immediately faced with his legs. Yes. I had to crane my neck to see what name was on the back of his jersey because he is that imposing leg-wise, as if he was on a pair of stilts!

This week, Stilts was named second star of the Q:

The second star is handed out to André Bouvet-Morrissette of the Drummondville Voltigeurs. The right-winger scored 4 goals and added 2 assists for a total of 6 points. Wednesday, in a 7-3 loss against the Quebec Remparts, he scored 2 out of the 3 goals for his team. Friday, in a 3-1 win versus the same team, he scored the third goal of the contest. Saturday, in an impressive 6-1 win versus the Baie-Comeau Drakkar, Bouvet-Morrissette scored a goal and added two assists. He was named the first star of the game.

The goal against the Drakkar was his 39th of the season. Dating back to last year, in which he first debuted with the team as a 19 year old, he has 101 points in 126 games. Not too shabby for a guy who was discovered pretty late.

He has the longest active goal-scoring streak in the league this season with eight. That's almost a franchise record that he won't get to tie or break because the regular season cuts him off by one game. The last forty-goal scorers with Drummondville were both drafted to NHL teams: Gabriel Dumont and Sean Couturier. But they were on teams who were at least more consistent than a bouncing tennis ball in a square room. (If you had to pick anyone whose Q career to be jealous of, I'd probably go with anyone who was there for most of the Sean era. Hey guys, I'm sixteen and probably the tallest guy here with the best playoff-beard capacities so let's win a President's Cup together! And even when we disband, my experience and talent will help keep this team afloat for two more years!)

But Stilts was only there for the tail end of the Sean era. People were skeptical about keeping him on as an overager. People were skeptical about him in general, and he just kept on keeping on, silently racking up points, respect, and leadership skills all while remaining humble. And now, with him as co-captain and in the top-20 scorers league-wide, those aforementioned people probably feel very silly.

The last two teams the Volts face in the regular season are: Shawinigan on Saturday (better get into the St-Patrick's Day spirit for that one, unless there's a chance the Cats haven't learned their lesson from the Rimouski game last week) and Blainville-Boisbriand on Sunday. I would love to be in attendance for either of them, but in all likelihood I won't, so I'll just transmit my energy into hoping for that number 40 for number 47.

Around the league: After winning 9 straight, Quebec was halted in their tracks by none other than these very Voltigeurs, after which they lost 5-0 to Gatineau who by some stroke of luck is still worse than us. Ha ha.

Alum-notes: Jake Allen's had a pretty rough go of this season, but he recorded his first shutout of the season on Sunday against the Abbottsford Heat. He's got top duties with the Rivermen now that Ben Bishop is off stirring the pot in Ottawa. Peoria next plays on Wednesday against Chicago.

I haven't figured out how this works, but despite being traded to the Islanders' organization on trade deadline day, Yannick Riendeau is back with the ECHL's Reading, where he started the season. Its affiliation is shared by Boston and Toronto, last I checked. Anyway, he got an assist in a 2-1 win against Trenton this weekend.

The McGill Redmen, who have a ridiculous amount of Volts' alumni and have somewhat forced me into betraying my alma mater by rooting for them, won the Queen's Cup 4-1 against Western and have put themselves into the CIS National Championships. Ben Levesque got the eventual GWG and former Volts' captain Marc-Olivier Vachon picked up an assist. Last year the Redmen lost to UNB (and Marc-Antoine Desnoyers) in the CIS final.

Meanwhile, Voltigeurs' school #2 UQTR, who was defeated by McGill last week, won bronze over Windsor by the count of 5-3. I can honestly say I don't know what happens to them now but I'm wondering if it means I have to find some way to keep Alexandre Demers' CIS eligibility valid because half the excitement of going to see UQTR these last few years was seeing him light it up again.

Misc.: In the "disconcerting stuff" category: Drummondville's potential playoff opponent as of this second is the Halifax Mooseheads. As a Czech sympathizer you can see my problem with this. Hint: it is vowel-free.