Game Day No. 42

It's time for Part 3 of the Bucks' Southeast Division weekend, as they will host the Corpus Christi IceRays in just about half an hour.

The Bucks won the first two games, defeating the Rio Grande Valley Killer Bees 1-0 at Dodge Arena on Thursday and 3-2 at the LEC last night. The shortness of that game story can be attributed to the game ending literally five minutes before the paper goes to press and the fact that we didn't have much jump space.

Those wins were both big for the Bucks, especially considering that the Texas Brahmas haven't lost since the Bucks beat them in a shootout last week.

Heading into tonight, the Bucks (24-14-4, 52 points) are still 10 points back of the Brahmas (29-10-4, 62 pts.). The Brahmas will host the Tulsa Oilers in their game.

But back to last night, here is what Coach Ruskowski had to say about the game:

"My mother told me a long time ago that if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all...we're just, we're not playing Buck hockey at all. We don't move the puck, we're not playing smart. There's something missing. If you want to be successful, everybody has to grab the rope and pull, and some guys tonight didn't pull the rope at all.

"I thought the first 10 minutes we played pretty well. Obviously we played hard, and they took penalties. We didn't seem to score on the power play as much as we wanted to. I think we missed Jeff Bes in those kind of situations."

As far as tonight, here is Bryan Benway's preview, and here are the Pointstreak pre-game notes. Dang, I had forgotten it's a special jersey night.

The IceRays (17-21-4, 38 pts.) have lost three in a row and are 0-3 against the Bucks at the LEC so far this season. Bucks lead the overall season series 6-0-1.