Telltale signs Stamkos close to form
The most heartening news of the week for a Canadian hockey fan — though not a Canadiens hockey fan — might have come from the scoresheet of Monday night’s Montreal at Tampa Bay game.
Steven Stamkos scored his eighth career hat trick in a 7-1 win over the Habs.
It signified that the 24-year-old victim of a famously gruesome leg fracture last fall, an injury that cost him a trip to the Sochi Olympics and left nervous followers worrying that he might never be the same again, was back.
Or was he? Is he? Will he be?
“Well, that’s kind of the million-dollar question right there: Is it ever going to feel the same as pre-injury? I don’t know the answer to that,” the Tampa Bay sniper said Friday, a practice day for the Lightning in preparation for Saturday’s game against the Vancouver Canucks.
“We’re closing in on a year (since he snapped his right tibia against a Boston goalpost last Nov. 11) and usually they say that’s kind of when the body is adjusted to the injury and probably heals to the capacity it’s going to heal, so I’m looking forward to getting to that mark and seeing how it does feel.”
If that sounds a little, well, equivocal, it may be because he’s been blanked in the Bolts’ other three games. Or more likely, because there’s still a 16-inch titanium rod fused to the bone in his lower leg and it will be there forever. One of the two screws holding it in place was removed six weeks ago. The other remains.
That’s the physical part. The psychological component is more difficult to gauge.
“I think I want to get to a point where I don’t even notice it’s there any more, I mean physically,” he said.
“I think when you feel something physically, the mind’s always going to know it’s there. I’m in a way better state than I was last year, that’s for sure, where you were trying to protect it on the ice. We’re past that now, where I’m back to being able to just read the game and react out there.
“But you do know it’s there. So I guess to answer your question, we’re not there yet. I want to get to a point where I can wake up one morning and not even realize that the injury happened.”
Game’s finest
Stamkos’s valiant attempt to recover in time to play in the Olympics for Canada last winter ran out of time. The Canadians did just fine without him as it turned out, but not every country could have afforded to lose a player many believe is in the conversation with Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin and the Islanders’ John Tavares as the game’s finest.
The injury also prevented him from playing last New Year’s, when the Lightning visited Vancouver, so Saturday will mark his first game appearance at Rogers Arena since Dec. 11, 2010, when he scored twice, including the overtime winner, in a 5-4 Tampa victory.
Lightning coach Jon Cooper sees solid progress in Stamkos’s game and is confident he’ll be back to pre-injury form. But that bar was set awfully high.
“It’s hard to say because, in my eyes, he was the best player in the league when he got hurt,” Cooper said. “I think those 17 games he played at the end of last year, mentally he was tentative. And I think this year, for the most part, a lot of that has gone away.
“Are there some instinctive situations that he still has to fight through mentally? Maybe, but to me he’s night and day from where he was at the end of last year and he’s climbing towards where he was before he got hurt.”
For those anxious about his well-being, a series of videos Stamkos filmed with Bauer this summer, promoting its new hockey stick, would have eased some concerns.
In the videos, Stamkos — whose most famous previous filmed endeavour was as a player who got traded by his own father in a Coke Zero commercial in which Bob McKenzie (“I’d have traded him sooner”) played the Zamboni driver — comes across as a fully formed, multi-dimensional person complete with a sense of humour.
He is seen slapping pucks off a driving range mat (hitting targets 75 and 100 yards out), blasting a slapshot 91 yards through the uprights at a football stadium and — the funniest one — “breaking stuff ” arrayed in front of a goal with shots that shatter all kinds of household items, including cake, watermelons, a pinata and an old-fashioned TV set.
It’s hard to imagine it looking like that much fun with Sidney Crosby doing it.
“We did it a couple weeks before camp,” Stamkos said. “All three were in Atlantic City. It was a high-school football field, a driving range and then when we broke all the stuff on the ice, that was at the Flyers’ practice facility there.
“They’ve been a lot more successful than I thought. We’ve got a lot of exposure out of it, which is great for Bauer and the new stick that’s coming out. And for me, the response has been great.”
It also didn’t hurt that he filmed a segment with James Duthie in which the TSN anchor tested Stamkos’s reputed photographic memory of every goal he’s ever scored. Stamkos passed the test, down to the last detail of a random goal Duthie chose.
All of it helps make Stamkos’s chiselled mug familiar to fans across the country. Also at airport security, when the hardware in his leg sets off the alarms, he can usually get by with an explanation.
“Your face is your passport?” someone asked.
“Yeah, I guess,” he smiled. “Especially when I come to Canada.”