Komets

Happy locker room. Everybody was amazed by what Frenchy did. He totally controlled the game. Komets showed good team toughness by not reacting to Watson's cheap shot. It gave them some much-needed time off the penalty kill. Rockford had 53 shots, plus I'll bet the Komets blocked seven or eight before they got to him. They were mostly from long range, but Frenchy did make some excellent close-in saves as well. It was one of those games where I could tell about five minutes into the second period that there was no way Rockford was going to beat St. Pierre tonight. He was dominating.

It is incredibly windy here and I haven't even started talking to anyone.

For those of you who didn't buy the paper, you can see our preview stuff here:

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/sports/hockey/uhl/

Guy Dupuis and the assistants are J.C. Ruid and Mario Larocque. They were selected by the coaching staff. Interesting piece of trivia: Guy will be the first and only player to be the Komets' captain in both the IHL and the UHL. No other IHL Komets' captain is still active as a player.

1. There's a bunch of stuff coming over the next three days in the paper that I hope you'll like. At least I had fun writing it (and truthfully, isn't that the only thing that really matters? LOL).

List your questions here.

UHL CEO/President Richard Brosal just finished an hour-long teleconference with the meeting that was very informative. Among the highlights:

The Komets released defenseman Adam Blanchette this morning. That gets the roster to 22.

Don't forget we'll have Larry here starting at 7 p.m. to answer your questions.

This comes to us from long-time Komets fan Bill Hudson who has gone all-Chris Berman on this year's roster. Some of these are quite inspired.

Those released today were Charle Levin, J.S. Richard, Chris Cote, Daniel Ljung, Martin Aubin, Drew O'Connell and Carl Michaelson. This brings the roster down to 23.

``Practice was OK that way today,'' Komets coach Pat Bingham said. ``It's definitely a manageable
number. If we have to make moves beyond that only time will tell. Our aim and our goal is to get the guys we have as ready as we
possibly can for Friday night in Rockford.''

Just talked Pat Bingham (who is celebrating his 38th birthday by the way), and he said they'll probably get to 22 or 23 players tomorrow, and then they'll see what happens.

``The decisions aren't obvious,'' he said. "From there they really get hairy.''

He, too, said between six and eight rookies will survive the first cut. He's not sure when the next cuts will be made, and could even come after the first weekend of play. Each team can have a 19-man active roster, but you can also put up to four players on injured reserve and another on team suspension.