So, I'm in Michigan for Thanksgiving, and thought I would take the little ride to Troy to HockeyTown Authentics...

...they had plenty of overpriced jerseys left, not much equipment - just some skates, and maybe 20 sticks. Nothing really from any of the 'big' players (Zetterberg, Lidstrom, Datsyuk, Howard, etc). The best player they had sticks of (which were priced pretty reasonbly at $100 - a few were a little more) was Filppula - luckily for me, that's a guy I collect..

so, got myself a Filppula stick



For those of you who don't know, Illich also own the Tigers, so they had some Tigers stuff too - some game used bats, tons of autographed balls.. I've been wanting a game used baseball for a while, and they had this box of grab-bag balls for $35 - where you get either an auto ball or a game used ball... didn't really feel like playing that game, so I went back to the auto balls, and spotted this..



Avisail Garcia auto'ed game-used ball from his MLB debut

I'm about to walk out the door, and I thought to ask one of the guys there if they had any game-used pucks. They had maybe 10 goal pucks. I liked the idea of getting a Zetterberg goal puck, until I saw the $175 price tag (which isn't a bad price, actually - just more than I wanted to spend)... so, I see this puck:



recognizing the Filppula signature, I asked if this was a goal puck

sure enough it was



I'll settle for the assist by Z, at 1/3 of the price

wasn't expecting to have any 'mail' to post this week... should've known that I couldn't resist going to HockeyTown, and definitely couldn't resist buying something

grabbed all these goodies for less than the price of a box of Dominion