Proteau's Blog: Campbell comes through in the clutch

Thoughts from this weekend's action:

For her first time doing it, Cassie Campbell performed fantastically as an analyst on Hockey Night in Canada.

It took her a period to develop a rhythm with play-by-play man Bob Cole, but Campbell wasn't afraid to call out players for their mistakes and knew her in-game strategies inside and out.

Here's hoping the HNIC producers recognize a good thing when they've got one, and find a way to mix some booth work into Campbell's duties as a sideline reporterÂ…

Open-ice checks don't get much more painful – or painful to watch – than the one Colby Armstrong dropped on Trevor Letowski Saturday. Armstrong maintains the hit was clean, but we'll maintain he was more than a little late laying in on Letowski…

Thumbs up to Kings fans for creativity in the face of poor performance by their team.

As the Dallas Stars were manhandling Marc Crawford's charges for the second straight game, the crowd at Staples Center took the team's new marketing slogan – “Play Hard!” – and converted it into a clap-clap chant of “Let's play har-der!”

The NHL needs not only more Hanks (see our blog droppings from Friday), but also more singing of insults from the stands, a la soccerÂ…

As usual, I got a greater amount of “how-do-you-think-my-team-will-do?” e-mail from Bruins boosters this summer than any other group of fans.

Just about every one of them was cautiously optimistic – although if you were to break it down to specifics, they were 75 per cent cautious, and 25 per cent optimistic. After Boston's 1-3-0-1 start to their season, I'd say their worst fears are in the process of being realized. Hey, it could be worse – they might not be used to it…

If there was ever any doubt before, there's none anymore: Bring back the Buffalo Sabres' throwback, blue-and-gold jerseys on a full-time basis.

The old style got broken out Saturday and never looked better, especially compared to the modern, Power Rangers motif.