Perry keeps things stirred, if not shaken
CHICAGO— At his most irritating, Corey Perry can appear 30 years old going on 13.
Consider a small moment in Game 2 of this Western Conference final between Perry’s Anaheim Ducks and the Chicago Blackhawks. It came on the periphery of a scrum in front of the Chicago net. Blackhawks forward Marian Hossa was standing nearby, observing the breakup of the pile, when Perry made an odd decision: He grabbed ahold of Hossa’s stick and attempted to yank it from Hossa’s hand.
Hossa, a 36-year-old Slovakian stoic, was not riled by this act of provocation. He followed Perry for a moment, keeping a hand on the stick. But when it became clear that Perry might not let go, Hossa — who didn’t want to get dragged into a tug-of-war with a bully — simply released his grip. For a moment Perry stood there, holding both his own stick in one hand and Hossa’s in the other. Then Perry dropped Hossa’s stick on the ice and skated away.
There was no penalty, of course; referees, sadly, cannot mete out two minutes for immaturity. But it raised a question: Why would an otherwise accomplished athlete, the NHL’s 2010 MVP, stoop to such nonsense? Even his teammates sometimes wonder.
“He agitates, does things people don’t agree with all the time, and sometimes we don’t agree with,” Ryan Getzlaf, Perry’s longtime teammate, was saying Friday.
“But he puts the puck in the net, goes to the dirty areas, he plays hard and he plays to win. That’s an attribute to him, what he can bring to the table. In our locker room, we love him.”
In other words, he’s a perfect flagship player for a team that builds its game on frustrating its opponents, on wearing them down with tactics both fundamentally sound and occasionally suspect. The Ducks are a well-built club, to be sure, complementing the high-end skill of Perry and Getzlaf with Frederik Andersen’s fine goaltending, four-line depth and a six-man defensive corps that’s proving more than serviceable even without the luxury of a worldclass horse.
But Anaheim is up 2-1 in the Western Conference final, where Game 4 goes on Saturday, in large part because they’ve been better at the not-so-fine arts of playoff success.
Anaheim, for instance, stands in front of pucks better than the Blackhawks. In 9:18 of Chicago powerplay time on Thursday, the Blachawks managed to direct precisely one shot on goal and a series of would-be shots on goal into a forest of shin pads and skates and sticks. The Ducks blocked 27 shots to Chicago’s nine for the game. And just to prove that their impenetrable wall of big bodies isn’t immovable, the Ducks landed nearly twice as many hits as the Blackhawks in Game 3.
On Thursday, as the Ducks clung to a one-goal lead in an eventual 2-1 win, they made it their philosophy to avoid turnovers at all costs by intentionally icing the puck more than once. Given that they’ve won 54 per cent of faceoffs in these playoffs, they reasoned that they’d take their chances on the dot than surrender a scoring chance trying to make, you know, a play. But don’t get it wrong: In a by-any-means-necessary moment, they rode out Chicago’s late-game flurry to emerge with a victory.
“I think it frustrates (the Blackhawks),” said Ducks forward Andrew Cogliano. “In those situations if you’re able to ice them a few times, slow things down, just get a rest, I think it works to your favor.”
So Anaheim is playing the game of hockey, but they’re also playing a game of attrition, seeing if Chicago can handle the agony of the slow drip. The Blackhawks, after all, look tired. And why wouldn’t they? They’ve played 90 playoff games in their six most recent playoff runs.
As for the Ducks, playing in their first conference final since their 2007 Stanley Cup win, they’re doing what they feel they have to do to keep this playoff drive alive.
“We can’t play a run-and-gun game,” Getzlaf said. “We’re not a team that’s built to skate up and down the rink all night long and trade chances. We’re just not built that way. We have to be able to execute our system and the things we want to do. We’ve been doing a fairly good job of that so far.”
Perry, to be fair, has been far more than an agitator. He and Getzlaf have racked up 16 points apiece in 12 playoff games, most in the West. As an agitator, though, he doesn’t have much of an equal on the other side. Chicago centreman Andrew Shaw is the most animated rival; on Thursday Shaw drew a penalty by shamelessly faking being shaken up by what looked like a high stick from Getzlaf — that is, until a look at the video showed Getzlaf’s stick hadn’t actually come in contact with Shaw’s face.
But the Ducks didn’t even make a fuss about the fake job. Perry, by contrast, definitely has the Blackhawks’ attention, if not their affection. In a game in November Perry caught Hossa with a blindsided crosscheck to the kidney that left Hossa crumpled on the ice in pain while Perry skated off as if nothing happened.
“He’s an all-round player . . . one of the toughest guys to get the puck off in the league,” Patrick Kane said of Perry earlier in the series. “And he has that physical, nasty element to his game that you have to be aware of.”
Perry, indeed, knows a long-held truth about the game of his life. In a bloodsport, it’s better to be the bully than the target. And in the psychological stare-down of a best-of-seven series, the fact that they’re aware of you means you’re probably doing your job.