I’ll write up more about the NHL’s presentation and overall conference later (I am in charge of technical support for a new student orientation this week, so time is tight), but there was one ironic and timely point in it that I must share. DiLorenzo mentioned that one of the things they have struggled with is responding via their NHL Twitter account in the wake of disciplinary news: “No matter what the discipline department decides, we’re going to get tons of tweets that say ‘You’re wrong.”

He mentioned that at 2:40. By 8:40, the NHL had another massive disciplinary situation on their hands: Vancouver Canucks Aaron Rome’s hit on puck-less Boston Bruin Nathan Horton that resulted in a severe concussion.

Rome was suspended four games by the league for the incident, effectively removing him for the remainder of the Stanley Cup Finals. On Twitter the reaction to the NHL’s decision varied immediately, ranging on the Goldilocks scale: some fans thought it was too much, some thought it was too little, and some thought it was just right.

Assume you are one of the two folks who man the @NHL Twitter account (yes, there are only two, mentioned DiLorenzo Monday.) How would you effectively use your Twitter account to respond to each type of fan? Do you not respond to one group? Do you respond to all? Because of the mass of Tweets, do you just not even try to respond to them at all? Do you focus on the negative ones first, where it sounds like you’re losing a fan?

And if you are a fan who Tweeted at @NHL about today’s disciplinary decision, what response were you hoping to get?

As one of the only Boston Bruins fans on the planet who doesn’t hate Phil Kessel, I’m beginning to understand my father’s sentiment.

You may hate Phil Kessel all you want – sports fandom thrives on hatred, as sad as it may sound. Intense fandom means hating particular teams and defector players. As a Buffalo Bills fan, I hate the Dallas Cowboys. I hate the Dallas Stars for making my Buffalo Sabres fan mother sob in 1999. I understand the dislike of those dreaded dirty Habs. I get it. Fans hate players. Fans boo players. Fans go on rants about players.

But after a year, isn’t it enough?

What did Phil Kessel do besides recognize that the current system of the Boston Bruins has no place for college-built players (aka, why Blake Wheeler is always a subject of trade rumors, and why Chuck Kobasew was trade bait, why the player who showed the most in training camp, Matt Bartkowski, was sent down, and why it’s an absolute long shot that David Warsofsky will ever see the Garden ice)?

Kessel didn’t hang with the guys? Well, he wasn’t 21 for most of his time in Boston, and many of his friends were college hockey players in the area. Who are you going to hang out with – a guy you know from the National Development Team that is your age, or a guy with a family, kids, who may be 10 years older than you? Kessel may have hung out with guys outside of the team a bit more than others, but when you have existing friends here (of which he did on many of the area college hockey teams), you’re going to spend time with them. That never made him any less of a Boston Bruin.

Kessel didn’t want to be a Boston Bruin? The NHL is a business, and hockey players are trying to make a living. If you’re offered a job with a pay increase, aren’t you going to consider it? And if you don’t have strong ties to an area, office, or business, money becomes that overwhelming factor in that decision. A young kid, with a relatively short career to spend making a living from playing hockey in comparison to the length of the career of us desk jockeys, decided to make more money while he could.

The Bruins brass enjoys a certain type of player, and that isn’t the nuanced non-fighter that college hockey and US junior hockey currently produces. And that’s the Bruins’ choice, and it’s working for them. Kessel wasn’t going to fit into that system, and is flourishing in the Toronto Maple Leafs system, a team run by Brian Burke, an executive that might understand the training and style of a player like Kessel better than anyone else in the NHL. A player like Milan Lucic thrives in the Bruins system – a junior hockey bred bruiser whose defensive mentality is as welcome as his offensive play-making. A player like Kessel, the exact opposite, was not going to last long term, despite his early success, because he plays a different style of hockey.

Both organizations seem to be reaping the benefits of the trade. Tyler Seguin, obtained with the first rounder received in the Kessel deal, is a steady player whose presence offensively has been very helpful to a Sturm and Savard-less Bruins. Kessel has brought direly needed goal scoring and excitement to a much-maligned Maple Leafs franchise. It’s worked out well on both ends – a quality many trades do not amount to in the long-run.

And personally, I find it a bit disingenuous that Bruins fans, an entire year post-trade, take delight in the hits to and booing of a young man who once had cancer, who never sad anything awful towards them, and who, while he was in Boston, contributed substantially to his team.

So fellow Bruins fans, find another joke. To use my dad’s saying, last night was the third time, and it’s not funny anymore.

Derek Stepan is just one of 8 former college players listed in today's Transactions. (Photo: BroadwayHockeyDaily.com)

Thursday’s start to the NHL Free Agent signing period was a nice pace of busy – just enough to keep die-hards engaged, but not so much as to seem like free agents were being tossed like slippery fish in Pike’s Place Fish Market in Seattle.

For us college hockey fans out there, many of the giant moves of the day had little to do with college hockey alumni. That isn’t to say that college hockey alumni stayed still – some moved, one officially left early, and we found a blog favorite swapped right before bedtime on free agency eve. A few quick notes for college hockey fans looking to keep up with Day 1:

- University of Vermont hangs with the Gophers and Badgers. Of the eight college hockey players (my own hand count – feel free to call me out if I’m wrong) changing hands or signing deals since late Wednesday evening, two were from the University of Vermont: Martin St. Louis (whose four year contract extension with the Lightning was previously announced but officially went through today) and The Swedish, blog favorite Viktor Stalberg (who found himself a part of a giant deal where he was swapped with others by the Maple Leafs in exchange for Chicago Blackhawks Kris Versteeg and Bill Sweatt, a Colorado College alum.) The Catamounts tied with the University of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota for the most amount of former college players listed on the transaction wire in the past 24 hours (2 each). Now about that “former players” bit, Badgers….

- Derek Stepan officially ended his college career today. Stepan, the WCHA leader in points and assists this past season, ended his collegiate elgibility by agreeing to terms with the New York Rangers (quite the college hockey friendly franchise, eh?) He played two seasons for the Badgers, and captained the victorious squad at this year’s World Junior Championships. Not a shocking early leave, but still a early college departure in a season chock full of them…

- The State of Hockey gets one of their own. St. Cloud State alum Matt Cullen was signed to a three year deal by the Minnesota Wild today, after playing with the Carolina Hurricanes and Ottawa Senators this past year. Cullen is from Virginia, MN, giving him what is sure to be the “Little Boy In Minnesota” dream trifecta: grow up in Minnesota, play college hockey in Minnesota, then play professional hockey in Minnesota. Awww. I’m such a sucker for those stories.

Your list for Day 1, with help from TSN.ca (Happy Canada Day!)

- Toronto swapped Viktor Stalberg (UVM-Hockey East) and two others for Bill Sweatt (CC-WCHA) and Kris Versteeg from Chicago.

- Martin St. Louis (UVM back during the ECAC days) signed a four-year contract extentsion with Tampa Bay.

- Derek Stepan (Wisc.-WCHA) agrees to terms with the New York Rangers officially, thus ending his elgibility two years early.

- Matt Cullen (St. Cloud State – WCHA) signs a three year deal with the Minnesota Wild.

-Adam Burish (Wisc. – WCHA) signed a two year deal with the Dallas Stars after spending three seasons with Chicago.

- Jordan Leopold (Minn. – WCHA) signs a three year contract with the Buffalo Sabres.

-Jonathan Matsumoto (Bowling Green – CCHA) signed a two-year, two-way contract with Carolina. He’s spent his four pro seasons in the Phantoms organization in the AHL.

-Paul Martin (Minn. – WCHA) signed a deal with the Pittsburgh Penguins, after spending his entire pro thus far with the New Jersey Devils. (I initially forgot this, and didn’t see it listed when I was investigating the TSN transactions list Thursday evening, but big thanks to Laurel for reminding me.)

A fountain Dr. Pepper machine. (Photo: sage.kitamorn.com)

While trying to hatch up some tough college hockey related NHL playoff trivia questions for my gig managing the Rival Films Facebook page, I noticed a press release on the Pittsburgh Penguins team page regarding the beverage contract for their new arena. The Consol Energy Center will have an exclusive beverage contract with Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, which means RC Cola, Dr. Pepper, A&W Ro

ot Beer, and 7Up will be flowing out of the concession stand fountain machines, and Snapple and Fiji water bottles will be available along side them. This is the first beverage deal for the Penguins in quite a while, and is one of the first I’ve ever heard where the exclusive beverage rights were given to someone who isn’t Coca-Cola or Pepsi.

Dr. Pepper? Fountain soda Dr. Pepper? Alongside hockey? Well, wrap me up and ship me UPS to Pittsburgh.

If there is a weakness I have in life, fountain soda/pop is undeniably it. Don’t even begin to tell me how awful it is for me – I am more than fully aware. Even a year working in the Campus Center Dining Hall at Ithaca College, where I was often made to change the disgusting looking syrups for the fountain soda machines, could not dissuade me. Before I became addicted to coffee, the rare occasion I had fountain soda was my vice.

If my actually being able to have a fountain soda before college was a rare occurrence, finding Dr. Pepper on tap was even rarer. Ithaca had Mr. Pipp, its inferior counterpart, on one fountain in the dining hall. It sufficed. Binghamton didn’t have it at all on tap. It’s near impossible to find here in Boston. Dr. Pepper is just difficult to find in fountain soda machines in general, and the whole idea of a entire arena filled with them is simply glorious.

And why Dr. Pepper? Dr. Pepper was Everyone’s Favorite Mormon Quarterback, Steve Young’s, own vice. Mormons are forbidden from having caffeine (which just about cut Brigham Young University from my college list as an 18 year old, which made my Catholic parents happy), but in a Sports Illustrated profile in 1994 or 1995, Young was caught drinking Dr. Pepper. The writer questioned him about the transgression, and Young mentioned that it was a weakness he had, one he usually hid from others. Tweenage/teenage me was sold. My mega-crush drank Dr. Pepper, and now I needed to.

My parents were nonplussed, and entertained my newest obsession with a single 2-liter of Dr. W, the Wegmans brand version of Dr. Pepper. The real stuff was too expensive, they told me. I could be happy with this one allowance, and then go back to drinking multiple Tupperware pitchers of cheap knock-off Kool Aid that lined the top shelf of the old fridge.

So of course I take some perverse pleasure in finding a fountain Dr. Pepper machine somewhere in my adult life. Thirteen year old me urges me to indulge, and fourteen year old me attempts to egg me into texting my mom and telling her, “Nah, nah, nah. I’m having real Dr. Pepper, and you can’t stop me because I’m in my late twenties and live 7 hours away.”

Perhaps a roadtrip to the Pens new arena is in order.

(Have you noticed that I’m on a blogging redesign/relaunch yet? Two days, two posts….get excited for the official relaunch in the coming weeks.)

twoeightnine's "Franchise Quarterbacks - Buffalo Bills" shirt. (Photo: TwoEIghtNine)

Featured several times on Yahoo Sports’ Puck Daddy (the pantheon of hockey blogs, if you will), twoeightnine Design’s t-shirts have become a hot commodity for hockey fans all over. With shirts featuring those always present allegations of diving towards Sidney Crosby, and an Shepard Fairey-esque salute to the single man who turned around Washington (hockey, that is), the online shirt shop struck a chord with fans that wanted witty and intelligent fan t-shirts.

Of course, once I found out Matt Johnson, the founder of twoeightnine, was running his business out of Western New York, and that he features the following “Franchise Quarterbacks – Buffalo Bills” shirt in his store, I had to feature him on the blog. Besides talking t-shirts, I of course had to ask Matt’s thoughts on the always depressing state of the Buffalo Bills.

Kat: How long have you been designing shirts? How did you get start up twoeightnine?

Matt: I think I’m at 2.5 years now? Maybe three? The last few years have been a strange trip for me and I really have no sense of time anymore. I got my start designing a t-shirt for Deadspin. It was back when the site was still “underground” but starting to make a name for itself. There was a small loyal group of commenters who joked about the start of a revolution. I took a sketch I did of Will Leitch as Che Guevera down to my neighbor in Philly who was a screen printer and twoeightnine was born.

Kat: Your designs run the gamut of sports, teams, and regions. Do you come up with all of the design ideas, or are some ideas submitted by fans of that particular sports or team?

Matt: They’re all mine. I tend to gravitate towards the Sabres and Bills because those are my teams and I prefer to work on ideas that I’ll enjoy working on. I’m in the process of expanding from that while killing some older designs at the same time. Right now I know I have limited periods where I do most of my sales. Mainly NFL training camp and Christmas. Plus most of my sales come from the Upstate NY region. It’s something that I want to break away from.

I’m always open to anyone’s ideas but the fact of the matter is that 99% of the time they suck. It’s a very inside joke or something that has no staying power past a week or two. As much as I love designing shirts at the end of the day I have to sell them too in order to make it worth my time. Something that only sells a handful of shirts isn’t going to do that.

Kat: What has been your best selling design?

Matt: The Beast Mode shirt for Marshawn Lynch, hands down. It’s not even close. Even with the suspension and the down year people were still buying it. Unfortunately I still haven’t sold enough to make a dent in those “lovely” I ♥ Buffalo sports shirt. If you’re a guy and you wear one of those please check your balls at the door.

Kat: As a Bills fan, I thought the Bills Franchise Quarterbacks design was depressing…until I saw the new Browns Franchise Quarterbacks one. Then I felt just a twinge better. Personally, which franchise do you think has a better chance of escaping their QB woes sooner?

Matt: Can I vote for neither? I guess if I had to choose I’d pick the Browns. I trust Holmgren and Co. more than I trust Ralphy and his crew. I’m not sure what happened this season in particular as opposed to the last ten but the switch finally flipped for me. My diet is now koolaid free. I need results before I get any sense of hope up. Unfortunately those results this year look like they’ll be even more losses.

twoeightnine's "Beast Mode" homage to Marshawn Lynch

Kat: Marshawn Lynch (subject of your Beast Mode shirt): lost cause or a risk to continue taking by the Bills organization?

Matt: The second one, by far. I don’t understand the “cut or trade him now before he screws up again people” at all. Nothing he’d bring back in a trade is worth it; he’s still a talent on a team seriously lacking it. And frankly anyone who says cut him is an idiot. I’m not sure what the real risk is. If you cut him now you don’t have him, if he gets suspended you don’t have him. But if he doesn’t get suspended you have a pretty good one two punch with Jackson and Lynch. It’s not like if he gets his third strike the Bills are going to have to forfeit the rest of the season or people are going to think that they’re a poorly run franchise that only has a future in Toronto and is one of the laughingstocks of the league.

twoeightnine’s shirts are available for sale on their website, and Matt is also active on Twitter.

NHL: St. Louis Blues

Last night, the St. Louis Blues mixed their St. Patrick’s Day commemoration with environmental awareness, and gave away a “Green Game” t-shirt to all fans in attendance (quite a risky claim to advertise – from personal experience, you should always give an exact number of giveaways, a la “first 5,000 fans”). The shirt giveaway was sponsored by Monsanto, a Cambridge, MA based agricultural innovation company with an emphasis on sustainable practices. This was the second year for the Blues promotion.

Shirt Grade: B I like the muted, antiquey kelly green shirt and faded style of the print. It also helps that the Blues’ team colors happen not to horribly clash with green. Kudos for using that to their advantage and not changing the logo’s colors for the holiday’s sake. Environmental awareness initiatives during games are the new “it” thing to do in sports marketing – trust me, I participate in one – but the giveaway needs to be backed up with sustained, but subtle, green initiatives, otherwise it is just a t-shirt giveaway.

AHL: Wilkes-Barre Scranton Penguins

The Baby Pens (speaking of, we are long overdue for an edition of The Everyone’s Favorite Goalie Watch, but that’ll be another post) are selling two St. Patrick’s Day long sleeve shirts in their online store. The 2009 edition ($20) features their mascot, Tux, skating with a four leaf clover in the background on the front. The back reads “Happy St. Patrick’s Day.” The 2010 version ($22) features the logo in what appears to be a very dark green (nearly black), with a four leaf clover on the sleeve. Long sleeve shirts are always key in that part of Pennsylvania, where the damp gray chilly days seem to out number any other weather.

Grade: C The effort is there, but the execution is not. The 2009 version is too campy, and the 2010 version shows promise, but the green seems too dark. Kudos, however, for the 2010 edition’s four leaf clover on the sleeve.

ECHL: Gwinnett Gladiators

The ECHL Gwinnett Gladiators teamed with Old Time Hockey, the same Salisbury, MA based company who partnered to create some of the NHL’s 2010 St. Patrick’s Day gear, to create a green t-shirt to sell this March. The shirt ($20 with free shipping through today) features a rather disturbed and surly looking leprechaun brandishing a hockey stick, with a small Gladiators logo by his right foot. The all-caps font is rather 1950s style, and arches above Surly Leprechaun’s head.

Grade: A This is the first ever St. Patrick’s Day shirt I would ever consider purchasing, and not just because I’m in the market for a shirt from the team where two of my most favorite former BU hockey alums play. What sold me was the 1950s fonts – I’m a sucker for fonts. Plus, I feel like Surly Leprechaun is going to hurt me with that hockey stick if I don’t like the shirt.

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While watching the New York Rangers take on the Pittsburgh Penguins Monday evening on Versus, my friend Laurel wanted to look up Rangers rookie Michael Del Zotto’s exact age, so I pulled up the Rangers website on the good ol’ MacMini. A Flash overlay popped up immediately across the bottom of the page – one that included Boston University hockey alum Chris Drury doing his best James Bond impression.

The overlay was an advertisement for the Rangers’ Casino Night to benefit Madison Square Garden’s “Garden of Dreams” foundation. The event is February 8th, and it’s for high rollers only – tickets range from $500 to $2000, and attendees must be dressed to impress.

Drury has represented his country in the Olympics, fulfilled every dream of any kid who grew up playing hockey in New England, and now he gets a picture of himself looking like he’s about to order a “shaken but not stirred martini” at a swanky bar splashed across a NHL team’s website. Chris Drury, we salute you. Until Matt Gilroy starts busting Russian spies and jumping from speeding trains, you get the award for being the most Bond of any BU Hobey Baker Winner.

Matt Gilroy had been named the best rookie in training camp by the Rangers staff just 3 months ago. (Photo: SNY.com)

Wednesday evening, former Boston University captain and rookie New York Rangers defenseman Matt Gilroy was outskated by Chicago Blackhawks right wing Dustin Byfuglien (a last name more difficult than my own) to allow the game-winning goal in overtime.

Thursday morning, Gilroy was summarily dismissed  by the Rangers and assigned to the AHL’s Hartford Wolf Pack.

And Saturday evening, I got a Facebook notification inviting me to the group, “Put Matt Gilroy Back on the Rangers.”

“We want to send a message to the Rangers front office that they need to move Matt back up to the NHL!” exclaims the description for the group. Created Saturday afternoon, the group already has 377 members with a wide variety of loyalties. (It grew from 324- 377 while I was writing this blog post.) A few BU teammates belong to the group, quite a few BU hockey fans, some New York Ranger fans, and a large contingent of members with the last name of Gilroy. (Not surprising, seeing that the Gilroy family is rumored to rival the population of Syracuse, New York in numbers.)

As the news of Gilroy’s demotion hit Twitter on Thursday, I learned that Rangers fans are quite opinionated, and were blaming general manager Glen Sather for the move right and left. They were calling for other defensemen, such as Michal Rozsival, to suffer a benching or demotion. Even ESPN anchor Linda Cohn got into the action, tweeting, “Can somebody explain to me why in the world the Rangers would mess with the head of Matt Gilroy and send him down to Hartford?”

In comparison, the Facebook group is pretty mild. A group member actually spoke up to explain why moving Gilroy is easier than demoting a more seasoned player and possibly exposing that player to waivers. Others continue to express anger at Sather, and still others are writing “keep the faith” messages to Gilroy.

Whether Gilroy’s demotion was warranted after his Chicago gaff, or this was a move to get him more playing time, the progression of this Facebook group will be quite interesting to watch. Will Matt Gilroy himself join? Will it catch on further among the Rangers faithful? Or will it go the way of those ubiquitous “I lost my phone – can I have your numbers?” groups?

The Rangers must really want me to like them. I must resist. (Photo: Flickr user Bari D)

Note from 10/16/09: In this piece, I mention at the end that a bunch of my favorite players were picked up by the ECHL’s Charlotte Checkers. Two days after I posted that, nearly everyone was either released or put on injured reserve. So the whole last three paragraphs of this piece no longer makes sense. The rest of it is good though.

I typically despise anything New York City related. An ex-boyfriend dumped me years back because I was from upstate and he was from downstate, and thus the differences were too great to navigate. Rochester-born me wasn’t too fond of the metro New York area before that, and after that, really started to dislike the city that everyone else loves.

I moved to Boston, a place where everyone shares my general disdain for Jay-Z’s favorite city that doesn’t sleep, and have settled nicely into disparaging the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets and Knicks along with any anonymous person I run into on the street.

Until this month, that is.

You see, the New York Rangers are trying to win me over. First, they signed Matt Gilroy, the most revered Boston University hockey player of the last decade.  That alone wasn’t going to sway me. Then, they resigned left winger and Rochester-bred Ryan Callahan. Okay, fine. A Rochester kid is playing in the NHL. No biggy. He’s not the only one.

Then the Rangers actually kept John Tortorella on as coach, tantrums and all. Torts was my favorite Amerks coach of my Rochester days, leading the Amerks to a Calder Cup in 1996. Then Torts went and grabbed former BU center, Mike Sullivan, as his assistant coach. At this point, the Rangers began to really nag me, like Philip, the boy in my first grade class who kept trying to tell me he liked me by comparing me to the token females in old school Nintendo games. No, Rangers. Stop trying to suck up to me. Stop telling me I’m your Zelda and you’re going to rescue me from whatever. No, I do not want to attend your Mario Brothers birthday party and play Princess Toadstool.

Then I had to read over the program for Red Hot Hockey, the BU-Cornell hockey game that is being played at Madison Square Garden in late November (which, shameless self-promotion here, I did the player profile pages for) which includes many gratuitous mentions of Chris Drury and Gilroy both being former BU players, both being Hobey Baker winners, both playing for the Rangers, and being from the Tri-State area. Fine. I get it. They’re both good stories. Learning-to-read fiction material for 6-8 year old Canadian boys. Whatever, Rangers. Just let me be.

Then, Jason Lawrence gets a tryout contract with the ECHL’s Charlotte Checkers. (Yes, this blog has been in denial since the Providence Bruins released him, thus why it has taken me weeks to mention this fact.) On the Checkers are two other BU alums, Kenny Roche and Kevin Schaeffer, and Hockey East and Austin Prep (my adopted New England high school) alum Chris Capraro, and Rochester boy and former Michigan goaltender Billy Sauer. Fine, Checkers. Load up on six-degrees-of-Kat players. I don’t have a favorite ECHL team, so you just won the non-existant competition to be mine.

In researching my new favorite ECHL team, I looked up their AHL and NHL team affiliations. Not all teams have them, and some teams have multiple ones. The educated guess would be that a team located in Charlotte, North Carolina might be associated with the Carolina Hurricanes. But no.  That’s when I realized my several month long resistance was frutiless.

The Checkers are affiliated with…the New York Rangers. And now, whenever they aren’t playing the Boston Bruins, I might just have to root for a New York team. Might being the operative word.

Bruins rookie camp (Photo: Twitter @NHLBruins)

Readers of …On Being a Sports Girl are quite familiar with the reoccurring feature, “The Everyone’s Favorite Goalie Watch,” a series I began to follow the fledgling professional career of everyone’s favorite recent Boston University goaltender, John Curry.  While Curry will always be one of my favorite college hockey players, and I will never give up that feature, my other favorite has now turned pro, and will now get a series of his own.

Readers, welcome to my reoccurring look at the fledgling professional hockey career of former BU right wing Jason Lawrence, a series I have yet to find a good, non confusing name for. (I originally named it something else having to do with the wonderful and memorable restaurants of Lawrence’s hometown, which also happens to be the hometown of my fiance, thus I’m quite familiar with it. However, the name just didn’t work, and I am open to suggestions.)

Lawrence is currently taking part in Boston Bruins rookie camp in Kitchener, Ontario, one of eight invitees to the camp. The remainder of the camp roster is filled with drafted or acquired young players, such as Zach Hamill and Jamie Arniel. (On a side note, another rookie camp participant is 2006 sixth round draft pick Alain Goulet, which makes me picture Will Farrell impersonating Robert Goulet on hockey skates, crooning “Bob Goulet needs a second chance.”)

On Monday afternoon, the Bruins rookies took on the rookies of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the first of three games the rookies will participate in while in Kitchener. The game was live blogged on the Bruins website, and while doing work around the house, I would periodically walk by the computer and check out what was going on.

Everything seemed to be going fine for the Baby Bruins. Lawrence got an assist on a goal late in the first period. Then, I checked back a few minutes later, and saw the following live blog update:

15:48 – Lawrence to the locker room — under his own power — after a shot to the face. Wrister. The B’s training staff was right there and took care of him.

Great. The kid gets injured in his first game action as a semi-member of the Bruins organization. In his first almost-NHL action, he suffers a shot to the face. Remember, in college hockey, players have cages, while in professional hockey, they tend to not wear them. Although I can’t say for sure, because I wasn’t there, this may have been his first game action without the cage. Getting a shot to your face in your first game without a cage is irony at its finest.

Lawrence came back at the end of the second, leading to Bish, the Bruins live blogger, to write the following:

Lawrence is BACK! Thank goodness…

He then proceeded to start the third period with a penalty after he “held someone up.” How could he commit a penalty when he probably either couldn’t see clearly and/or probably couldn’t spell his own name at the moment?

The Bruins ended up winning a high scoring game in overtime, 6-5. No further word on the Lawrence injury was noted by the Bruins, but I imagine since he was playing through the third period, he’ll be fine to play during the rest of rookie camp. The rookie Bruins have practices Tuesday, then a game Wednesday against the rookies of the Ottawa Senators (aka, the future Binghamton Senators…my early condolences on having to play in the Broome County Arena. I don’t wish that arena on anyone.)

When rookie camp concludes later this week, some of the participants will continue on to full Bruins training camp, which starts this upcoming weekend. Those committed to playing major junior this season will go back to those teams. Others will be sent home by the Bruins, and still others will get to continue onto Providence Bruins training camp, starting September 21st. According to the Providence Journal, Lawrence will continue onto Providence camp after rookie camp concludes.

For more information on Bruins rookie camp as a whole, I encourage you to check out the Boston Bruins website. There are some great stories out of these campers, and the Bruins communications team is doing a great job with coverage (including an entertaining blog of the 12 hour bus trip from Boston to Kitchener.)