CJ Boiss

Good news: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-vaccine-doses-end-july-1.6071473 Hopefully Ontario opens up this summer, and you can get some skates in before the winter season.

Even the steel release really isn't that big of a deal. Everyone should have a small screwdriver in their bag, and that works fine for popping the catch. If it lowers the risk of my steel popping out when a puck hits it (a la Bauer) that's a worthwhile trade to my mind.

All of V1 sticks appear to be on clearance in my neck of the woods. I've got some CRs and an M1 Snr stick, wondering if I shouldn't grab some of these as well...

It's dazzle camo.

Coop probably has the best advice. Your top priority needs to be your health, and school. If you neglect your health then it doesn't matter what else you're doing, you won't be at your peak; and most guys, even if they end up playing hockey professionally, will end up doing other things after their career is over. Your education will be vitally important later in life, and shouldn't be overlooked. Health and school are the foundation for the rest of your life, and sacrificing either for a low-level retail job or hockey (much as we all might love it) is a bad idea. Since you really want to pursue hockey as much as you can, it seem like you've already decided it's more important than your retail job, the catch being that it's also necessary to fund your hockey. Ideally, there should be people and support systems in your life that allow you to pursue your passions without worrying about money constantly. Obviously, that isn't a reality for lots of people, and there's no easy answers here. We don't know the specifics of your financial situation, so any advice we can offer on that front would be limited at best. (speaking very generally, I'd recommend seeing if there are any areas in your monthly budgeting that you can cut back in to save money, and also talking to your boss at work about changing your hours to better accommodate your school and hockey)

Con confirm. I use a pair of Quick curve twigs for shinnies and I can't play the puck nearly as well as the Bishop curve twigs I use for games. Like, I can get the same amount of power, loft, etc. out of a Quick curve, most of the time, but not reliably. And about 10% of the time whatever I'm doing just fails horribly. The performance isn't as reliable as my Bishop curve.

Fuck Tampa. All my homies hate Tampa.

Normally I'm one of those "I'd rather win Bronze than lose for Silver" type people, but I genuinely don't care this year. Gold or Silver, it's a win I'll be happy with.

Mangiapane leading Team Canada to the promised land.

I'd like to see the league use "for the rest of the series" suspensions. Guys don't get paid for playoff games, so there's no reason they can't provide an undetermined suspension like that. That said, I feel 4 games is about right. I'd've done 5, because that way he only comes back in the event of a Game 7, and a series deciding game is far too important to be singling out any one individual for retribution. But 4 is fine, and appropriate for a guy with no history.

Dangerous and predatory. Sheifele could have made a play for the puck, probably would have saved the goal if he did, but once he hit the top of the circles and started gliding he'd decided that he wanted to absolutely bulldoze a kid as he came out from behind the net. Gutless thing to do.

Regular season ended on the 13th. Calgary/Vancouver were the last game of the night, and it was a reschedule, so I count it as post-season [EDIT] that would make Edmonton the first team in NHL history to go 0-5 after the end of the regular season. XD

Calgary and Vancouver had 4 games after the regular season ended. Calgary won 3.

Calgary had as many wins during the post-season as the Leafs, and they weren't even in the playoffs.

The Breadboi! Fuckin' love Mangiapane, guy has no quit.

If it's not too personal, who's your cousin?

I've got a pair of 35+1 Vaughn V5s, if you need a stop-gap.

Hockey is back in my province June 10th. Not sure what restrictions there will be (if any), but everyone is able to get their first vaccine dose now (some people on their second), so I'm not super concerned on that front.

100% speculation on my part, but... If your neckguard only has a front then your chest protector will pull on it, and you'll feel that in your neck where it hangs from. If you've got fabric down the back as well then your chest protector will pull down on both sides, and you wont feel it in your neck as much.

As Chenner said, modern pads are designed to rotate fairly well, but if your strapping is really tight through the leg channel it might not have enough room to. I'd look at loosening up your channel strapping a little bit; realistically, you only need the pad to anchor well at your toe and knee, the rest is fairly extraneous in terms of keeping the pad square on your leg. If you want to keep the pad tightly anchored at your toes you can take some slack out of your laces or switch to elastic toe ties, as seagoal suggested. (personally, I wear my Vaughn pads very "sloppy" with my lace toe ties. The weight of the pad pushes off the front of my skate when I'm upright, which keeps the laces taught and the pad square; a leather strap behind my knee keeps me from falling off the back of the block, and a pair of leather calf straps keep the pads responsive. Easier to do this with soft pads and an open leg channel, which your S27s are not and don't really have, so this probably wouldn't work for you) Regarding your knee block issue, are you using an elastic strap to lock the pad in behind your knee? Because the S27 use a single internal break below the knee a nylon or leather strap (something that won't stretch when you put pressure on it), which runs behind your knee and above the break, should keep your knee from falling off the back of the block. You'll want it tight enough that no amount of force on the pad will create enough space between it and your knee that you land off of the block. I don't like relying on elastic straps to keep my knee on the block, they tend to fail during scrambles and pile-ups. Like what happens to Merzlikins on this play, at 14 seconds: https://youtu.be/IFWz7HgHtZE

Yeah, do not leave your collarbone exposed while playing ice hockey. I may or may not have accidentally broken a goalie's collarbone with a slapshot one time, because his chestie was too loose and he didn't have a dangler or neckguard with collarbone protection.

A bit of clear rubber fitting on the edge of your mask, it quiets the sound made when you dangler hits it.

I'll show you how I tie my dangler on, and explain why. So, I use waxed laces because they don't absorb water like a regular lace, and are a bit stiffer as well, which I find helps keep the dangler from swinging around too freely and knocking against my mask. First thing I do is make sure I anchor each lace around a weld on my cage. A solid anchor keeps the dangler from shifting around my mask the way it would if I looped it through the ear holes, or looped it around just a horizontal or vertical bar bar. I make that anchor by doing an inside-out kind of loop, I don't really know how to describe it but it's easy to replicate by looking; the only knot in my lace ties is made at the end of the dangler. The anchor loop at the cage weld increases the separation between my dangler and mask a touch, because the laces want to push out away from the mask a bit before gravity takes over and they droop down. The single knot, made on the outside of the dangler after feeding both ends of the lace through the hole, puts yet more lace between the mask and dangler to further reduce contact between the two. The width of the laces, after feeding them both through the same hole, keeps the dangler from riding up, and pulling the dangler down against the knots just tightens them so I never have to worry about them coming loose mid-game. I make sure that the knot on each lace ends *just* at the edge of the mask, which ensures that the dangler never hangs so low that it might get caught between my mask and chestie. The end result is a dangler that hangs low and forward, with quite a bit of separation from the mask, and very little contact between the two unless the dangler is doing it's job and catching a puck heading for my neck. (The scratches on the dangler were caused by my buddy, who wore it very tight and close to his mask before giving it to me, because he found it too noisy. And no wonder, the way he was wearing it the thing clattered off the edge of his mask with every head motion he made)

I wear my dangler low and loose. Never had issues with it catching my chestie. Out of curiosity, how are you tying your dangler on?

Actually though, it's going to feel more like you're playing on an ODR. Can't trust the lines on the ice to tell you where your net is - which probably won't have pegs to grip the ice, and could well be pushed up against the boards, making shots which miss the net way more dangerous in terms of rebounds and also eliminate any kind of behind the net play - and going cross ice will mean you can't relax like you can if you were playing with a full sheet, because guys can and will shoot at you from literally anywhere. If you want easy stoppages in play, or to slow things down, try putting rebounds towards centre ice. If the puck doesn't hop whatever barrier they've put up to divide the games, guys will play more conservatively and have fewer options to move the puck because there are no boards. And don't go out of your net to play the puck. Not enough time or space to do so reliably.