Faceoff men have tough battles ahead
SAN JOSE — From one centreman to another, Joe Colborne made his desperate plea before a faceoff.
He wanted his counterpart to stop doing what he was doing. Whatever it was. Pretty please.
“He knew I was a rookie,” recalls Colborne. “I’d been kicked out three times already. He’d go in first (at the dot) and I’d follow, and I was the one getting kicked out. Finally, I said, ‘Look, I’m trying to show the coach that I can win a draw … so let me at least finish a draw, take a draw. I don’t care if I lose it, I just want to take it.’ ”
Tellingly, Colborne, in his National Hockey League debut, failed to get fair play.
Not that his request fell on deaf ears.
Because he did receive a sneer and a pile of guff from his unnamed opposite on the Montreal Canadiens: “Hey, shut up till you have a couple hundred games under your belt.”
Colborne laughs at the memory.
“That’s the truth of it,” he says. “You have to put your time in.”
Boston’s Patrice Bergeron and Chicago’s Jonathan Toews are aces. In a not unrelated matter, they seldom square up for faceoffs.
“Those guys are at a 45-degree angle — and they’re never getting kicked out,” says Colborne, marvelling, not griping. “It comes down to gaining that respect. Once you have it, you can get away with a little bit more. You get relationships with linesmen, figuring out who you can cheat on and who you can’t. You have to mentally keep a catalogue of each linesman.
“It’s definitely an earn-your-stripes kind of thing.”
Which puts into perspective the unforgiving challenge ahead of the Calgary Flames’ newcomers.
It is worth nothing that the Flames, even with the educated likes of Daymond Langkow and Olli Jokinen on the roster, had suffered long stretches of ineptitude in the faceoff department. This, though, is different. Ahead of Saturday’s match against the San Jose Sharks, the trio of Ben Street, Sean Monahan and Colborne boast a combined total of 371 faceoff attempts in the NHL.
Joe Thornton, last season alone, won 410 draws.
“Experience is a combination of good moments and bad moments,” says coach Bob Hartley, whose most grizzled centreman is Mikael Backlund, with 176 games. “You put this in a bag and, suddenly, you get a two- or three-year veteran. You need the full book, and cheating definitely has a chapter in the book.” He need not tell Street. After a few years in junior, a few years in college, a few years in the minors, he has learned that the big-league dot is a brand-new stage.
“It’s different game to game, linesman to linesman,” says Street. “You’ve got to push the boundaries and find out what you can get away with. It’s different if you’re the home team, the road team. A rookie doesn’t get away with a whole lot that a veteran might get away with. There’s a lot of variables.”
Street, chuckling, says he’s still not even sure what a regulation faceoff might look like.
“It’s probably with all your skates (squarely) behind and your stick in the white,” the 26-year-old says. “Not a lot of guys actually do that. It’s cat and mouse. It’s a mental thing — ‘OK, that guy’s lined up this way, this is what I’m going to do to counteract it.’ It becomes a chess match. The guys that are the best year-in and year-out are the best guys at playing the game (within the game).”
Such as the aforementioned Thornton (who, curiously, is struggling at 47.7 per cent right now). The Sharks’ excellence, as a team, did coincide with his arrival in November 2005.
“It’s pretty valuable to have a guy like that on your team,” says Street, “because there’s a lot of knowledge that he can pass on. A guy like Thornton, if he’s good, then it does become contagious.”
Contagious enough that Logan Couture, 24, appears to have mastered the racket, operating at nearly 62 per cent — third best in the NHL.
But the planet’s finest faceoff man, in Colborne’s opinion, is Bergeron.
“Bar none,” says Colborne, who, with the Toronto Maple Leafs in the post-season, saw plenty of the Bruins whiz. “I’ve never had a guy when I went into every draw I was saying, ‘I’ve tried every single move I have and I can’t beat him.’ I remember asking (Tyler Bozak) and some of the guys (for advice) between periods, and they’re saying, ‘Well, we’re just happy that your line’s going against him because he does the same thing to us all the time.’”