A grand spectacle, imperfections and all
ANN ARBOR, MICH. — The Winter Classic is imperfection, written in letters two hundred feet high. The puck tends to slide off the road, and passes can die in the snow like unlucky explorers. The wind pushes you or pulls you, and the horn can blow while you’re breaking in alone. And at the end, even after you lose in the final gimmick of the day — the shootout, which the Detroit Red Wings lost to the Toronto Maple Leafs on Wednesday, as darkness closed in on Michigan Stadium — you are thrilled you had the chance at all.
“For a single game, as far as the atmosphere and everything, this is one of the greatest things I’ve ever been a part of,” Red Wings defenceman Niklas Kronwall said. “Probably (ever) will be a part of. Over 100,000 people, in a setting like this, with the fans really into it — a great experience.”
On Wednesday, the National Hockey League’s crowning spectacle came as advertised. It was beautiful and raucous and messy, in the biggest stadium in North America. The snow blew sideways and up and back again, and it never stopped. The shovellers kept having to clear a rink that looked like my driveway. A 30-foot pass, tape to tape, was a beacon.
“The conditions made it so some of the skill in the game was eliminated,” said Detroit coach Mike Babcock, who stood on the bench wearing a fedora and glasses. “I talked to Pavel (Datsyuk) about seven minutes into the game, and I said, ‘What do you think?’ And he said we’re being too careful with the puck, but he said we’ve got to be, because you’re scared to turn it over, there’s so much snow.”
Datsyuk has hands so great he could probably casually use his backhand to open cans around the house, and even he had to take it easy; in the shootout, he would be the only player to score using anything other than a straight wrist shot, going backhand high.
Detroit’s Daniel Alfredsson tried to go to his backhand against Leafs goalie Jonathan Bernier, and said, “I had him, but the puck slid away from my blade.”
And so it was a spectacle, for all its imperfections. But the imperfections helped make it great. It was hard to skate into the wind, and to handle the puck, and the horn sounded in overtime as Henrik Zetterberg was sliding past Cody Franson at the Leafs blue line, with open ice ahead. The teams had to switch ends in the middle of the third and the middle of the overtime to make the conditions even, so the clock stopped at 2:30 of overtime, and the play stopped with it.
But the ice got better as the game wore on, and the goals weren’t just wooden blocks of lumps of stone. James van Riemsdyk batted Toronto’s first goal out of the air with his quicksilver hands, and Tyler Bozak cleverly got a stick on a diving point shot, and Detroit’s Brendan Smith made a beauty of a backhand pass to Justin Abdelkader to tie the game with 5:32 left.
And every goal was thunderous. The attendance was announced at an NHL-record 105,491, and it was more or less evenly split between red and blue tribes, some of whom were tailgating at 6 a.m. The imperfections helped make this memorable because it was so hard to master this game that’s so difficult to master under even the best conditions, and the reward was such a roar.
“I think for the most part, it’s just a moment to cherish,” said Toronto’s Joffrey Lupul, who delivered a vicious cross-check to the neck of Patrick Eaves in the first period, leaving Eaves to struggle across the field and up to the tunnel to the locker room. “This is a lot different hockey game than you’re used to playing in a regular NHL arena, so this is one you just want to enjoy. I don’t know if they’ll be showing many moments or teaching points out of this game. At some points you couldn’t even push the puck down the ice.”
“On our first power play the ice had just been cleaned, so we zipped around, big-time,” Babcock said. “Our last power play was at 6:25, and I was actually sucking up to the official, I was hoping they’d do a scrape before we started. But you have to wait until six minutes. That’s just the way this game is, but I also thought that’s a big part of the atmosphere in today’s game that made it even more special.”
When asked what he would remember, Toronto general manager Dave Nonis grinned and said, “You mean besides the buzzer?”
“It is a lot leading up to it,” Nonis said. “I think it’s tough on the players, it’s tough on the coaches, it’s tough on the league. But I also think it created an atmosphere that made it more than just a game … for our team, I think that’s the hardest we’ve competed in a long time. When you look at over 100,000 people in the building, it’s impossible not to play harder.”
So you saw Phil Kessel backcheck like a madman after turning the puck over to Gustav Nyquist late — “He’s turned the puck over before in the same situation, and I saw the fear and desperation in his eyes,” Carlyle said — and you saw a game that harked back to pond hockey because of all those things that couldn’t be controlled.
You can’t do this every day. You wouldn’t want to. But ugly hockey never looks so beautiful.