Fall Season - Week Four - October 13th

8:00 PM- Sabr vs Yaqeen
Welcome Back! After a bye for Thanksgiving I-Slam Hockey starts back up on this auspicious Friday the 13th.  What a fitting way to kick start things again with none other than the team making the most noise throughout the first three games of the season, Sabr (yellow).  In the event you haven’t been following, Sabr is the only remaining undefeated team led by rookie sensation, Maaz Haq.  So far he has taken the league by storm and is tied for the overall scoring lead with Wakaas Khan of Ikhlas (although Khan got five points in one game against woeful Yaqeen), tallying 6 points.  What is equally or even more impressive is his brother, goaltender, Fahad Mohammad (also a rookie) starting off his career with three straight shutouts.  All signs point to a fourth straight shutout as their opponents tonight, Yaqeen (white), have a hard time generating chances.  In fact, if you remove their Week Two game against a short-handed Haya, they have only managed 10 shots against Emaan (orange) and 5 shots against Ikhlas (green).  However… spooky things have happened before on Friday the 13th.

9:00 PM- Ikhlas vs Haya
Are we back in June of 2014?  In the very first installment the Cambridge B team slayed the Cambridge A team enroute to hoisting the I-Slam Championship.  Fast forward three years later, the world continued to rotate; point and case where some of these players went from bachelors to being hitched.  Despite all that has transpired on and off the floor, the rivalry between these two squads burns stronger than ever!  The Cambridge B Team, Ikhlas (green) comes into this contest limping after losing two consecutive games with a combined score of 9-1 (loss to Shukr/red 4-1; loss to Sabr/yellow 5-0). So the bye week couldn’t have come at a better time as it gave them an opportunity to do some internal reflection to try to recapture the magic from Week One in which they put up 6 goals.  Did Ikhlas manage to figure it out?  We finally got a look at the Cambridge A team, Haya (grey) in Week Threeas all of their top-end players were in attendance.  They managed to hold on for the 2-1 victory over a very tough Shukr team.  With all the talk centered around Waqar “Boom Boom” Khan, it was Furqan Salam who put his team on his back, notching both goals.  Also making some noise for Haya is their goaltender, Kaunain Saiyed, who has faced the most shots (84) so far. To help conceptualize this, Saiyed has had to face 28 more shots against than the second highest goaltender in this category (Yaqeen’s Ahmad Mobin).

10:00 PM- Shukr vs Emaan
Shukr (red) and Emaan (orange) is a pickem’ game.  Both of these teams have scored five goals for and both have surrendered four goals each.  This game is a pivotal game early on in the season as the winner will most likely vault into second place or at worst move into third.  The loser of this game ends up with a cluster of four other teams at the bottom of the standings.  Emaan has been shutout for two consecutive games, against Sabr and Yaqeen.  It is not from a lack of trying, as they have managed at least 20 shots in their past two contests.  Go figure, Emaan occupies the second seed, partly because the four teams below them are also trying to gain some consistency.  However, if Emaan’s offensive troubles continue inevitably they will find themselves falling in the standings. For Shukr, the game plan is simple - FIND A WAY TO GET DAWOOD CIOMBAR THE BALL.  The sophomore has 75% of his team’s total goal production.  It looks like what is unfolding for this team is they need to come up with a strategy to get contributions from the other forwards.  Either that or they will live and die by the Ciombar sword