Gibson lets his play do the talking on the ice
KELOWNA, B.C .• To flash back in time if we may, Grant Fuhr would flash that leather to make big saves when they most counted, protecting a tenuous Edmonton Oilers lead in a high-scoring playoff game.
“I don’t care how many I give up as long as we win,” Fuhr used to say ad nauseam during the Oilers’ 1980s heyday.
It was the same story with Anaheim Ducks goalie John Gibson in Game 3 Sunday at Rogers Place in Edmonton.
After t he Oilers came back from being down 3- 0 early in the game to tie it, fourth- line Ducks forward Chris Wagner scored to gain the lead again.
But a minute later, the Oilers found themselves with a good opportunity to score: a three- on- one play with Leon Draisaitl leading the charge with Patrick Maroon and Ryan Nugent- Hopkins on lone Ducks defenceman Hampus Lindholm. After Draisaitl passed the puck to Maroon in the high slot, Gibson fought it off with his glove and then dove across the crease as Nugent- Hopkins batted the rebound out of the air.
On the play, Gibson said he was simply thinking of one thing: “Try to keep the puck out of the net.”
The Ducks went on to win their first game of the series.
“I had an idea he ( Draisaitl) was going to pass it … obviously, you’re not sure who it’s going to because there’s two guys over there, but Maroon got a pretty hard shot away,” Gibson said at Prospera Place in Kelowna, B.C., where the Ducks have travelled between games in Edmonton. “He got a lot of it. Just tried to get most of my body on it.”
Gibson grew up in Pittsburgh as a big Penguins fan. He was once cut by his high school team, which seems hard to believe. He found his way to the U.S. National Team Development Program and then the Ontario Hockey League’s Kitchener Rangers to play for current San Jose Sharks assistant coach Steve Spott.
Gibson definitely isn’t a stereotypical big goalie. He’s athletic in making many of his saves.
He’s had some r ough patches, getting pulled in Calgary in Game 3 of the Ducks’ first- round series against the Flames. He gave up a long goal to Oilers defenceman Andrej Sekera in the first minute of Game 2 in this series that looked stoppable. But Gibson made saves when they had to be made in Game 3, not that he went on and on about it. Gibson is not a talker. “He has a competitive spirit that’s really not displayed (outward). He’s more of an introvert,” said Ducks coach Randy Carlyle. “He burns inside, tries to keep his emotions in check, tries to focus on what he can control inside rather than outwardly.”
Carlyle agreed that for a goalie, it’s when you make the stops.
“That’s the competitiveness, it’s the timing of the save, time of the game, the dramatics of it … whether it’s a three- on- one, a twoon- one, a breakaway, people may not remember that because it’s not on the scoresheet, but as coaches we remember it,” he said. “We live it and go back through it.
“We can’ t expose ourselves to t hose chances against.”