Blogs

Tampa Bay Lightning center Brad Richards returned to his parents' home in Murray Harbor, PEI, on Thursday after being released from a Philadelphia hospital where he underwent surgery to repair a severe tear in his lower abdominal wall.

Richards, who won the Conn Smythe trophy as playoff MVP during the Lightning's Stanley Cup run in June, had been playing during the lockout for Ak Bars Kazan in Russia. He returned to North America in December after only 7 games (2+5) with the team, citing pain in his hip and abdomen. It was originally diagnosed as a sports hernia.

Richards expects to be able to begin working out again by late-March, which would be just in time for the home-stretch if the NHL's lockout gets resolved (yeah, right).

Tampa Bay Lightning defenseman Nolan Pratt has signed with EV Duisburg of Germany's Second Bundesliga for the remainder of the season. Pratt will join Die Fuchse (that's "The Foxes" to you and me) in a couple of weeks, at which point there will be only about a month remaining in their season. If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about how the CBA negotiations are going, you're thicker than a Hardee's half-pounder. Pratt's been keeping in shape playing pickup with Cory Sarich, Chris Dingman, Dave Andreychuk and Johnny Grahame at the Ice Sports Forum in Brandon.

Ahhhhh, my first European Hockey Update away from the third world dictatorship that HF has become. Lets begin:

All in all, the beat goes on in Europe for the Lightning's prospects. They have some excellent overage properties like Somervuori, But and Norrena but have yet to see the explosion from youngsters like Polushin and Kazionov they might've hoped for. The exception to the rule is 2004 entry draft 6th rounder Karri Ramo, who is emerging as one of the two best young goalies in all of Finland after having a remarkable performance at Traverse City.

After a number of days of posting content using the HtmlArea plug-in, I've decided to switch it off. The main reason for using it was the built in HTML table generation. But, in the end, I didn't like the way it created and formatted tables. In essence, it allowed too much flexibility in table generation, and I was looking for a way to lock down a single BP site style for our tables. There's a much better module for that called CSV Filter. Also, I didn't like the way HtmlArea created all these new paragraphs. It just didn't feel *right*.

Anyway, I turned it and the contextlinks module off.

This is really just a test, a chance to dip my toes in the new site. C'mon in, the water's fine.