The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

Sometimes you catch lightning in a bottle.

You’d think a 2-1 overtime game was some sort of defensive struggle, the type of game that the mere thought of having it on national television makes Gary Bettman sit bolt upright in bed and wake his wife to tell her about the horrible, Lovecraftian nightmare he just had in which “The Fastest Game on Earth” was reduced to some type of a 200-foot, 64-minute goalline stand in football with no one scoring ever and people in the Sun Belt turning off their televisions in disgust and major advertisers angrily calling NHL ad reps to pull all their commercials and every rink having 1,200 people in it, none of whom are happy to be there and all of whom want their money back right this second and it will be poor li’l Gary stuck holding the check for this league that overexpanded and crashed and burned under his watch and David Stern will laugh at him and deservedly so.

And yeah, a 2-1 scoreline does have that connotation, doesn’t it? It’s everything we’re meant to hate as hockey fans. SPEED! WOOOOOOOOOSH! GOALS! OOOOOOOOOOOOH! POWER PLAYS! BOOOOOOOOOOM!

But tonight’s game was so much better than some snoozefest Lamorielloan trapathon because, instead of the game being decided by defense, it was decided by an active lack thereof.

Both teams zipped up and down the ice tonight at breakneck speed and just poured shot after shot at both Cristobal Huet and Chris Osgood, neither of whom, statistically, really approach being good goalies. It was just one of those nights where the defense on both teams (one depleted by injury, the other woefully inexperienced for a game of this magnitude and hampered considerably by the fact that Brian Campbell is meant to run it) said, “Eh, screw it,” and both goalies went, “Yeah, it’s fine. We got this.”

And it’s funny that sometimes two fairly bad goalies can turn in something incredible, as the two took a combined shutout on 57 total shots into the game’s 46th minute before Dan Cleary finally got a puck past Huet, who really had no chance to stop it. And put it this way: apart from the game-winning goal by Darren Helm (and if you’re out there scratching your head over who screwed up the spelling of “Johan Franzen” so terribly, you likely are not alone), neither goalie gave up a goal he could reasonably have been expected to turn away.

Even Patrick Kane’s goal was an incredible individual effort that was only helped by Detroit’s insistence on not getting a stick in his general area and Brett Lebda giving him the old “Ole!” as he went rocketing past. Just shovel it on net and there ya go, Kaner.

But Helm’s winner was just one of those Detroity goals that their non-skill guys seem to be able to score time and again. Big shot from the point, forward running the screen takes an extra whack at it, it somehow kicks into the middle of the crease and someone else cleans up the clutter, no fuss, no muss.

I almost wrote that the way Detroit pulled out the win tonight was a bit surprising, but if I’m being honest with myself, it wasn’t that surprising at all. Cristobal freakin’ Huet got the nod and the defense in front of him barely showed up against the Detroit Red Wings. How else was it gonna end?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Good night. 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.