Highlanders Win Challenge Cup

The Highlanders captured the first jewel in their bid for the FunHL Triple Crown yesterday, sweeping the Bladerunners in two straight games to win the Challenge Cup. In the end the depth of the Highlanders line-up proved too much for the defending champions with 10 players garnering 3 or more points on the week. Led by D.Hasek's 8.33pts in net, the Highlanders were able to outscore the Bladerunners at every position, save right wing. In the end the much criticized decision of the Bladerunners to bench M.Kipprusoff and J.Iginla didn't matter, their contribution would have helped but would not have been enough. The final score in game two was 55 to 41, a 14 point win. The Highlanders celebrate their first major FunHL award since they last hoisted the Predator Cup in 1993. They will be able to quench that 14 year drought in one week's time if they can maintain thier now 38pt lead atop the Predator Cup standings.

The final award storyline that remains is the race for the Omnivore. The Scourge and Highlanders have been trading places for the last few weeks but Hasek's performance this past week was part of the reason that the Highlanders have been able to pull 9 points ahead. Still a 9 point lead can disappear in a flash. The Scourge have been relying in the timly scoring of Tkachuk and Blake on lw, Satan on rw and Poti, Markov, Redden and Rafalski on d to power their run. Ironically Blake and Selanne have a double impact on the race. Blake is on the Highlander baseline and has been a big part of the Scourge's quest while Selanne has been a huge part of the Highlander's run this year but every point he gets is part of the Scourge baseline. 7 days to go, expect the Omnivore to go down to the final day.

The Knights Templar become the latest team to cross the 900pt mark and could be joined by as many as 4 more teams before the season is out. Only the Scoure and Edge seem unlikely to reach the mark though the Scourge could make it with another 40pt week. If they do it would put 11 teams over 900pts making this one of the highest scoring seasons across the board in recent memory.

The race for draft positioning is also close for a lot of teams. The Wolves are in 4th and probably can not catch the 3rd place Great Whites but they are only 9pts ahead of the Shadowmen. The Shadowmen are themselves less than 7pts up on the Knights Templar. The Knights are similarly only a dozen points ahead of a trio of teams: the Personal Vendetta, Severed Heads and Ramapithicines who all enter the final week separated by little more than 3pts. Add to this mix the 10th placed Lost Boys who are only a dozen points out of 7th and you have the makings for a lot of shuffling over the course of the next seven days.

The battle for the Herbivore should be over by now but the Edge refuse to go away. Last week the Edge closed the gap by some 8pts however with a 20pt difference still to be made up the Edge are running out of time. The difference between last place and more last place is not that much so expect the Edge to pull out a Dog-like +/- effort to lunge up the standings - it was Volchenkov's +6 week that helped to close the distance last week so with a huge helping of luck it can be done.

Here are the unofficial stats as of Week 26: