National Post (National Edition)
HAWKS’ GATE
After a tough start to the post-season, the Hawks’ Crawford is firmly in control of the crease
Corey Crawford is firmly in control
of the crease.
Owning a 3-0 lead in their best-of-seven series against the Minnesota Wild affords the Chicago Blackhawks a little time to be fat and happy.
They didn’t practice in St. Paul on Wednesday, choosing instead to stay at their high-end hotel across the river, with a handful of players and the coach selected to perform media duties. Brent Seabrook and Andrew Shaw attended the press conference in hotel slippers.
“They’re nice,” Seabrook said, wiggling his feet a little. “Comfortable.”
As is the team, and for good reason.
The Hawks jumped on the Wild in Game 1, frittered away a big lead, but still managed the win. They played their best game of the playoffs two nights later and won easily, and in Game 3, they survived the initial pressure of a Wild team playing before a raucous crowd and held on for a 1-0 win behind stellar goaltending from Corey Crawford. They have played 180 minutes against Minnesota and have trailed for not one of them. As I say: comfortable.
Head coach Joel Quenneville, who for his next career could play the gravel-voiced homicide cop who’s stuck with a hotshot new partner who doesn’t play by the rules, even managed a little levity.
Asked about the redemption of Corey Crawford, and specifically how he addressed the first-round benching against Nashville, the coach said that he had talked to Crawford about the importance of being ready to go back into the net when needed. He said Crawford, the US$6-million-ayear goalie who had given up nine goals in a game and a half at the start of the series against the Predators, had done what he could to prepare himself to return, which he eventually did in relief of Scott Darling in a Game 6 comeback win.
“But I wouldn’t call it a benching,” Quenneville said. “It was a goalie change.” He cracked just the tiniest of smiles at this point. “Guys who don’t play, we might call it a benching, but with a goalie, it’s a goalie change.”
Quenneville was mostly making a joke, but the comment also said something about the delicate nature of a playoff goalie’s psyche. You don’t want to use the b-word around them because confidence is such a huge part of their success. And it can change in an instant. One minute Carey Price is everyone’s Hart Trophy favourite, and the next minute he’s giving up six goals at home to Tampa Bay. Jonas Hiller helps Calgary upset the Vancouver Canucks, and then is benched — sorry, goalie changed — against the Anaheim Ducks. There’s almost no position in sports like it, although the baseball closer probably comes closest, where a mistake is amplified and one player ends wearing the guilt of the loss.
Crawford’s teammates know that what happened against Nashville wasn’t easy for him. They talk about it in somewhat hushed tones: The dark times, before the light.
“We love Crow,” said Seabrook. “It was a tough couple of games for him, but you know, with that being said we didn’t really do much to help him out, either. We had to be better in front of him, and we knew he was going to be there to make the saves.”
Patrick Sharp said the heightened attention on the playoffs just means it’s a tough time to have a bad stretch.
“It’s easy to kind of beat yourself up and hear everybody on TV or in the newspaper maybe say some bad things about you, but we never doubted Crow for a second,” Sharp said. “Our goaltending position is going to be strong whoever is in there and it was great to see Crow have a great game last night.”
He’s not wrong about Crawford’s game on Tuesday night. The 30-save shutout included a lovely pad save to stop Mikael Granlund on a breakaway, preserving the one-goal lead in the second period, and several sequences in the third where Crawford was seemingly the only player able to follow the puck amid all the crashing bodies and chaos in his crease. He used a kick save to keep the puck off the red line in one scramble, and flopped over to scoop it away from danger with his blocker hand in another instance.
“That game” — which is to say, that win — “was a lot of Crow’s doing,” said Johnny Oduya on Wednesday.
Crawford wisely steered the discussion on Tuesday night away from his own performance, sticking with the team game theme.
“We were able to get pucks out and relieve the pressure,” he said. Credit your teammates with the win, and maybe they’ll be given more of the blame if you have a loss. It’s a good theory, anyway, and it’s certainly possible that Crawford yet has a bad game, but Tuesday’s effort is just the kind that Wild fans didn’t need to see.
Crawford has an odd style, often playing low in his net — the striking thing about talking to him in person is that he’s taller than you expect — which sometimes gets him in trouble, as in Game 1 against the Wild, when he was repeatedly beaten high. But in Game 3, he sat back and sucked everything up. Minnesota couldn’t get him out of position, because he anchored himself to the goalline when things got hairy. It was like he was building a fort back there.
And so, after an .850 save percentage in the first round, and losing the net for four starts to Darling, Crawford has saved 90 of 94 Minnesota shots in this series — a tidy .957 clip. Such is goaltending: one round’s goat is the next round’s hero. Crawford isn’t the only reason the Blackhawks have the Wild on the precipice, but he’s certainly one of them. And his teammates know it.
“If Corey keeps standing on his head,” Andrew Shaw said, “we should be all right.”