Ducks drop their fourth in a row

The phone rings and the Ducks GM raises his heavy head and cracks open his bleary eyes, swats the half empty beer bottles off of his bedside table onto the floor as he reaches for his cell phone.  He sleepily presses the phone against his ear …

“Have I got a deal for you!  My fifth in 2018 for Guhle and your first rounder in 2019!”The phone roars.

“Huh…sounds reasonable…WAIT a minute…No!”the GM slowly reaches consciousness, hits speaker and moves the phone away from his throbbing head.

“No?  Ok, how about my thirty-five year-old winger signed to a six year, $6 million per deal for...oh, I don’t know…Guhle and your first?”

“What?  No!  Who is this?”GM rises up onto his elbow and stares at his phone.

“Errrr...it’s the Rangers…”

“No, it isn’t!” 

“Plumber.”

“It’s the Sharks again, isn’t it?”

“Errr…no it isn’t…candygram.”

“Get lost Phillips.” GM hangs up the phone and rubs his aching head.

The GM glared at his now silent phone.

“My mother always told me, that if I didn’t have anything good to say about anyone, than…I must be talking about Kyle Phillips and the San Jose Sharks.”

Being a west coach GM was taking its toll on the poor GM.  He could generally stay somewhat sober thru the first two periods of the 4 pm games coming out of the East, but to make it thru the entire three periods of the eastern games and the 7 pm western games was proving tremendously hard on his liver.

The four game skid couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Mighty Ducks.  Derek Ryan was still out with his concussion, and the roster reinforcements had yet to arrive to the Ducks from their former teams.

Worse still, the fallout from the GM’s three earlier deals was raging across the league.  Most teams apparently now thought that the Ducks were easy pickings, and were offering even more one-sided trades than the ones that the GM had been receiving in the first month since he had taken the franchise over.

Even more egregious, the fourth straight loss, had apparently emboldened the Sharks GM enough to have the temerity to try to have a conversation with the Ducks GM.  How the mighty have fallen.  That never would have happened four games ago.

Even re-inserting the mighty Mark Borowiecki into the lineup had been unable to stem the tide of bad results in the loss last night.

The GM slowly got out of bed and looked for the Scotch bottle he had left on the TV.

It’s probably not Mark’s fault, the GM reasoned…playing Ben Smith as the third line right wing was probably never gonna end well…even if it was only against the Lightning.