HAWKS TAKE GAME 1
Late goals nix Lightning
Evidently it takes more than 10 minutes of yelling “Boo” really loud to scare the Chicago Blackhawks.
The Tampa Bay Lightning lay siege to the Chicago end of the ice to start the Stanley Cup Final, urged on by a bullish full house at Amalie Arena — and got the first goal, and for much of the ensuing 40 minutes, neither team seemed able to penetrate the barbed- wire fence of legs and skates and sticks between shooter and net.
In fact, Game 1 won’t go into anyone’s time capsule as a Stanley Cup classic, but the Blackhawks do know how to win, and have the stripes to prove it.
And with a late third- period burst that produced goals by Teuvo Teravainen and Antoine Vermette, the champions of 2010 and 2013 got their noses out ahead, winning 2- 1 to inflict the first scar tissue in a series that hopefully gets better.
“Great teams do that,” said the 20- year- old Teravainen, who also assisted on the game- winner. “I haven’t been a part ( of this team) for many years but I knew this is the team who can do that any time. We just fight back, play harder and get it back.”
It was a festival of blocked lanes and bouncing pucks and missed chances, which wasn’t exactly what these two teams had seemed destined to produce, with all the speed and skill on both rosters.
But the more adventurous club eventually won, and with any luck, that sends a message to a Lightning team that seemed to be trying to win 1- 0, and paid the price.
“We took our foot off the gas a little bit, sat back a little bit, gave them time and space with the puck,” said defenceman Victor Hedman, whose souvenirs from the game included what he said felt like a chomp mark from the teeth of Hawks pest Andrew Shaw.
“It’s a tough one but we’ve been in this situation before, losing the first games. We just have to rebound.”
“It’s not like we’re sitting here saying we gave them chance after chance after chance,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “Tonight, a good team found a way to score two goals.”
The Hawks must have been delighted to get to the first intermission with only a few minor burns and abrasions.
Under attack for most of period from the home side, which seemed to own the puck and the faceoff circle and win most of the puck battles, the Blackhawks did surrender the period’s only goal at 4: 31 — and it took a circus play to beat Corey Crawford — but the 1- 0 score decidedly flattered Chicago.
The Lightning goal was a highlight- reel job, if not the traditional kind. A half- fanned point shot from Anton Stralman sent a bouncing puck fluttering wide of the net but Alex Killorn, with his back to Crawford, took a backhand swipe at the knee- high disk and re- directed it into a narrow opening on the short side, surely a 1- in- 100 shot.
But the West champs started to level the playing surface by period’s end, and the trend continued in the second. If not for some crooked shooting by the Hawks, notably Marian Hossa, it might well have been tied, at least.
Killorn, the Harvard grad who has blended with captain Steven Stamkos and Valtteri Filppula to form the Lightning’s best line of late, missed three better chances — before and after — than the one he scored on.
But the chance that will stick in the home team’s craw was a clean breakaway by Ryan Callahan with 8: 20 to go in the third period, which Crawford stopped, keeping it a one- goal game.
A little over two minutes later, Teravainen, the lavishly talented Finnish rookie, sifted a wrist shot through a heavy screen — Hawks’ Marcus Kruger and Filppula were tied up in front of the net, and goalie Ben Bishop never saw it — to tie the game.
“I thought we had chances to put them away,” Cooper said. “We didn’t put them away. And once you do that, to me, that was letting them hang around.”
He called Teravainen’s goal “a seeing- eye single ... that goal had eyes.”
Another two minutes, and Teravainen chipped the puck off the stick of Lightning’s J. T. Brown right into the slot where Vermette, the veteran trade deadline acquisition from Arizona, picked the top corner over Bishop’s glove for the winner.
The Jonathan Toews- Patrick Kane- Brandon Saad line that won the Western Conference Final for Chicago wasn’t much of a factor Wednesday, thanks to the defence pair of Hedman and Stralman.
That said, Bishop had to make a handful of tough saves and was solidly in control of rebounds. But playing dog- in- the- manger against the Blackhawks is a much more dangerous game than doing it against the offensively- challenged New York Rangers.
“I think it was a great example of a team effort — and some huge offensive contributions from some guys that have been scoring big goals, but maybe don’t get the recognition they deserve,” said Toews. “Power play ( they were 0- for- 3) didn’t get it done for us tonight so someone had to come through.”
The Hawks, unlike the Rangers, have enough firepower to punish the Lightning if they play, as Chicago coach Joel Quenneville called it, “that prevent defence.”
It won’t do. The Lightning will have to engage.
He’s so familiar as a Chicago Blackhawk that you forget that Corey Crawford is from Montreal. But then a reporter here at the Stanley Cup Final asks him a question in French, and he answers in kind, and you remember.
And then he talks about why he wanted to stop pucks with his body.
“I forget what age I was, maybe eight or nine, I used to watch the Canadiens religiously when I was younger. I was a big fan of Patrick Roy, and I would say he’s pretty much the reason why I wanted to be a goaltender,” Crawford says.
Crawford goes on: “It was a pretty good idea when I was younger and then as you get older you start getting hit with harder shots and you’re thinking, ‘ What the hell was I thinking?’ But, yeah, obviously it has worked out pretty good for me to have made that choice.”
He says he remembers going into his parents’ room one night asking them if he could play goal: “And they probably looked at each other like, ‘ Oh no, please no.’”
This is, in his parents’ defence, absolutely the correct response. Of all the players on a hockey team, only the goaltender has a margin for error of next to nothing. Forwards and defencemen can have bad games, but the focus on what one of them did or did not do pales in comparison to goalie mistakes. And when it is a forward, like when Steven Stamkos wasn’t scoring in the first round, no one is calling for them to be benched entirely.
Have a bad game as a goalie, get yanked from the net. Have two, as Crawford did to begin the playoffs against Nashville, and get benched in favour of Scott Darling, who wasn’t even the No. 1 goalie on his AHL team this season.
Crawford seems to have the unpleasantness of the first round well behind him. And his counterpart in Tampa, Ben Bishop, a playoff rookie about whom there were many questions, has answered most of them, sort of.
Goaltending was not the story of Chicago’s come- from- behind 2- 1 win in the Stanley Cup opener, but this is the rare Final series where, if you caught each team’s fans in an honest moment, they would confess that their guy sometimes gives them the flop sweats.
In that series against Nashville, Crawford ceded the net to Darling for four starts, only returning to seal a series win in relief for Game 6. His numbers against the Predators: a 4.14 goals against average, and a wince- inducing .850 save percentage. He has since posted a .947 save percentage against the Wild in the second round and a .920 save percentage in the conference final against the Ducks, which is right on his career average for 70 playoff starts. He progressed to the mean, if you will.
For Bishop, it hasn’t been a bad series followed by a good one, but a lot of excellent goaltending interspersed with occasional bouts where he resembles someone who has been shot up with anesthetics and has lost control of his limbs. He gave up four goals in a crucial Game 5 loss to Detroit in the first round, but then shut out the Red Wings in Game 7. He gave up three goals and was pulled in Game 4 against Montreal in the second round. And in the conference final he gave up five goals — twice — to the Rangers and then six goals before being yanked in Game 6. All he did to follow that up was blank the Rangers at Madison Square Garden in Game 7.
As much as Bishop’s six- foot-seven frame can look as graceful as a drunk on roiling seas when things are not going well, he has beaten Carey Price and Henrik Lundqvist in consecutive series — both goalies who play with a calm, technical efficiency.
“It’s a boost of confidence” to beat those players, Bishop admits. “It’s a great honour to play against those guys and come out on top and move forward.”
Goalies always talk about the importance of having a short memory, of putting a bad game behind them. But it works the other way too: both Crawford and Bishop come into the final off strong performances, although it would just take one bad game to have the doubts renewed. Darling’s wobbles against Nashville saved Chicago coach Joel Quenneville from having to choose in the second round between him and the $ 6- million- a- year goalie he had previously benched. Had Darling clinched the series, it’s possible Crawford would still be wearing a ball cap and opening the bench door. And if Bishop surrenders a five- spot to the Blackhawks, it will surely be noted that Tampa coach Jon Cooper doesn’t have the time against an opponent as good as Chicago to let his goalie work out the kinks.
Bishop sounds like he is fine with that.
“You like that weight on your shoulders,” he says. “You like the pressure, but I think most of all you’re extremely competitive. There’s a lot riding on you.”
He’s quite right. Cue the fans, adjusting their collars.