Higher

It was hard for me to get any higher this weekend, on the east coast anyway. We climbed Mt. Mitchell, the highest point east of the Mississippi and I'm still a bit sore, but what a great time! I hope everyone else had a great weekend as well!

Reviewing hockey news over the past couple of days, of course the Ducks beat Ottawa again to take a 2-0 lead in the finals. That Anaheim team is one tough bunch. For those of you who like the forecheck, it doesn't get much better than that! Daniel Alfredsson and company better get their collective acts in gear or this will be a short series.  On Tuesday, Gary Bettman weighed in with his thoughts about the Nashville situation. He kind of said that it's not a foregone conclusion that the Preds would be moving, although he didn't exactly give his assurances that they wouldn't move either. (unlike what he did with Pittsburgh). I still think that it seems very unlikely that Balsillie would shell out that kind of dough for a team that he could not relocate. We'll see what happens.

During some recent surfing I found out that Justin Williams has his own homepage! It's linked from NHL.com under "NHL Player Sites" but strangely enough it's not linked directly from Carolina Hurricanes.com yet. In any event, I have another link to the site under Justin's picture on the right sidebar. It's certainly worth a visit.

I'm going to be working a lot on the CanesCountry site over the next couple of months, so expect to see some changes. I plan to have one page primarily for news and information, and then keep this blog page primarily for opinions and comments. Hopefully things will improve for the better, but if you don't think so, let me know! If anyone has ideas, suggestions, or things they would like to see, please email me (canescountry@gmail.com) or leave a comment. I respond to every email sent.

Finally, I am very pleased to announce that fellow Hurricanes fan, Matt Karash, the regular Canes blogger at HockeyBuzz.com and XM radio Home Ice correspondent, has agreed to be a part-time guest blogger here at CanesCountry! Matt and I had a great discussion over lunch last week and of course couldn't help but share each other's views about the state of the Canes. I see that he recently put up a blog entry at Hockeybuzz about the Canes defense. While I don't always agree with Matt, I certainly respect and admire his hockey knowledge which is right up there with any of the other regular bloggers at HockeyBuzz.com. Welcome Matt, we look forward to reading your input!Â

Creed