Barvan in the Annual CORA Hockey Pool

I was invited to join the CORA playoff hockey pool even though I am retired.

So I got out my playoff prediction program.  I ranked the players in the order that I wanted to pick them.

A couple of days later, Barb and I particpated in a conference call with the other poolies.  There were 11 of us.  Barb and I were exactly in the middle of the selection order.

Our first pick was a defenseman from Pittsburgh.  Then we picked a forward from Vancouver.

Our next pick should have been a Montreal player.  Barb and I couldn’t bring ourselves to pick him because we thought Montreal was a low scoring team.

We ended up skipping over him and many other players.  We concentrated on just two teams.  We ended up with 7 Vancouver Canucks and 5 Pittsburgh Penguins.  My reasoning was that with so many poolies, the only way to win was to pick the final two teams.

The pool organizer named us Barvan . I thought that was better than Ivarb.

There was one poolie, Benoit Arbour, who couldn’t make it to the draft.  So he sent his picks to the organizer.  The organizer picked 12 players for him from the leftovers.  The organizer then challenged the other poolies to beat Benoit.  He called Benoit’s score the “Arbour-Line”.

We lost all of our Vancouver players in the first round when they were beaten quickly by the San Jose Sharks.  So all we had left was our five Pittsburgh Penguins.  They are good players but Pittsburgh, as a team, is not playing well in the semi-finals against Boston.  We will have a hard time getting over the Arbour-Line.

One of the poolies lost all 12 of his players.  He had players from four teams that all got beaten in the first round.  He was the first victim of the Arbour-Line stigma.