Champs Washed away
Ward’s OT winner eliminates Boston in closest series ever
Toward the end of the second period Boston’s Rich Peverley was being pushed around, and he turned at Washington goaltender Braden Holtby and started an angry two-handed slash that he stopped short of the Capitals netminder by a few inches, just enough.
Holtby stood with his arms crossed, a statue. He might not even have blinked.
And Game 7 between Boston and Washington was about who would blink first, and who would follow through.
It was the first playoff series in NHL history to have all seven games decided by a single goal; it was as close as a playoff series can possibly be, or has ever been. And it belonged to seventh-seeded Washington, in the end, who eliminated the defending Stanley Cup champions on a goal from Joel Ward 2:57 into the fourth and final overtime of the series for a 2-1 result on Wednesday night.
“They were looking to dump, and I thought we might go off on a change, and then I saw we had a little bit of a break up ice,” said Ward, a Scarborough, Ont., kid who was undrafted and who has carved out a 46-goal, 314-game career. “It happened so fast. I knew he was going to take the puck to the net, and I was just trying to follow it up . . . I saw it lying there, and gave it one of the hardest whacks I’ve ever given a puck.”
“It wasn’t pretty,” said Capitals owner Ted Leonsis of the series. “It was beautiful.”
And with that goal — on a follow-through, messy but effective, from a guy who had not scored a non-empty-net goal since Jan. 7 — Boston joined Vancouver, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Detroit on the sidelines in this strange post-season.
The goal came when Bos- ton’s Benoit Pouliot failed to get a dump-in deep, and veteran Mike Knuble lugged the puck all the way to Tim Thomas, who sprawled to stop it. But it bounced straight to Ward, who slapped it in. And Boston was done.
“Our best players, we probably needed more out of their game,” said Boston coach Claude Julien, referring to a number of Bruins. “I didn’t think our team was in tune as much as it was this time last year.”
When I saw him score I’m probably the happiest man in the world. ALEXANDER OVECHKIN
And with that, a year in which Boston’s season was at least partly defined by Thomas’ refusal to visit the president in the White House with his teammates in January ended with some degree of irony. Some Boston reporters said Thomas walked on the sacred Bruins logo after the game; there is speculation that the divisive former Vezina winner will be on the market this summer. And it was Ward and the Capitals who sent him there.
“When i saw him score i’m probably the happiest man in the world,” said Washington’s Alexander Ovechkin.
The series was won with Ovechkin treated not as a star but as a piece, as Capitals coach Dale Hunter — the last man to score a playoff overtime winner in a Game 7 for the Capitals, way back in 1988 — preferred to muck up the games. Ovechkin played 16:25, sixth among Washington forwards.
The team’s second-leading scorer this season, Alexander Semin, was in a similarly beached boat.
Whatever Hunter’s intent was it worked, thanks in part to rookie goaltender Braden Holtby, who made 31 saves, and partly because Washington played a brand of defensive hockey that didn’t exist when this franchise was winning the Presidents’ Trophy.
“Every single game we were both in it, both had a chance to win,” said Washington defenceman Karl Alzner. “It’s one of the better series I’ve ever played in or even seen. It was so intense.”
Indeed, the Bruins-capitals match was, by the numbers, perhaps the most narrowly contested playoff series of all time. Six of the gamewinning goals came either in the final two minutes of regulation (Games 3 and 5), or in overtime (Games 1, 2, 6 and 7). There was one two-goal lead, for a little less than three minutes, in Game 5. Coming into Game 7 the two teams spent 71 per cent of the time tied.