The Two-Line Pass

Handsy, Dono. Real handsy.

With NHLers in the Ottawa area looking for goalies to help them prepare for the upcoming season, sometimes things can get a little desperate. That’s why Chris Kelly, Chris Neil, Chris Phillips, Shean Donovan, Anton Volchenkov and Jason Smith and several other National Hockey League players ended up ripping shots at some eighth grader.

When a scheduled goalie didn’t show up on time to the training session, Chris Neil started scrambling. He stuck his head in the first locker room he could find, and asked the first available goalie with pads on if he would mind getting out on the ice with them. It just so happened that goalie was 13-year-old Christian Rusu.

Was it a step up from anything he had ever experienced before?
“More like a big leap,” he said as he removed his goalie mask, revealing his braces and the beginnings of a moustache.
“At first, I didn’t know what was going on in the drills because they were going so fast. It’s nothing like I have ever seen before. I came out to the top of my (goal crease), and, all of a sudden, I looked one way, then the other, and the puck was behind me and I was thinking, ‘Where did that come from?’”

Good to see they went easy on him.

As the session went on, Rusu got more comfortable and made a few saves (better than Dan Cloutier would have done). He even stopped Shean Donovan on a breakaway, which has to be the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever read in my life.

“He was really good,” Kelly said. “I’m sure it was fun for him and the boys were trying to get a rise out of him.”

Rusu goes back to class next week, where absolutely no one will believe his story, and he will surely be shunned by his peers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under Sum-sum-summertime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.