When it comes to overtime, Hawks thrive
CHICAGO— It was getting late in Anaheim on Tuesday night, the wee hours on this side of the continent, when Patrick Sharp of the Chicago Blackhawks looked down at the floor and cringed a little.
“You know what the worst part is?” he asked.
He was talking about the worst part of playing in the longest game in the 88-season history of the Blackhawks, a 3-2 triple-overtime win over the Anaheim Ducks that evened Chicago’s best-of-seven Western Conference final with the Ducks at one game apiece.
Was the worst thing the frayed nerves, the crushing fatigue, the still-lingering suspense of where Mike Babcock might one day find generational money? Was it the frustration of futilely lofting pucks at a human wall named Frederik Andersen, who at one point stopped 47 straight Chicago shots?
No. None of that. The worst part of playing a game that lasted nearly as long as two games was more personal than that.
“Your feet get sore,” said Sharp. Or, at least, his did.
Certainly a prognosticator’s head could throb, too, attempting to decipher the meaning of the opening pair of games in a hard-to-pick series many are calling the de facto Stanley Cup final. There’s not much to choose between the two teams left standing from the superior Western Conference. Both have one win apiece. Both have managed a combined 89 shots on goal. And Chicago is winning the Corsi war by only the slimmest of margins — 50.4 per cent to 49.6 per cent.
But there is an interesting point of post-season differentiation between the teams: Overtime experience. The Blackhawks have tons of it, plenty of which has been positive. The Ducks don’t have as much, and too little of it is favourable.
In a league in which overtime games can feel like coin tosses — well, the percentages have been far from 50-50 for the Blackhawks and Ducks.
Since winning the Stanley Cup in 2007, for instance, Anaheim has a 5-8 win-loss record in playoff overtime contests.
In stark contrast, the Blackhawks have now won seven of their past eight playoff overtime matches.
Father Time may be undefeated, as the old sports saying goes. But Father Extra Time? The Blackhawks own him. In their six most recent post-season runs, they’ve won a whopping 64 per cent of OT games.
“It’s always nice to go through it a few times before,” said Sharp. “I’m not sure quite why we get into these situations over and over again.”
When they do, it must be comforting to know that their starting goaltender, Corey Crawford, didn’t stop a career-high 60 shots on Tuesday night in a one-off fluke. Crawford’s 13 career playoff OT wins are tops among active goaltenders.
Certainly he’s been given more opportunity than most. The Blackhawks’ six most recent playoff runs have seen them play a whopping 89 games to date, 28 of which have gone to overtime. In other words, they’ve gone to overtime in 31 per cent of their playoff games since beginning their 2010 Cup run. This season just 22 per cent of NHL playoff games have gone into extra frames.
How do the Blackhawks explain such a disproportionate number, and their success therein?
“The more you do it, the more you stay with the process, stay with the structure, all this stuff,” team captain Jonathan Toews told reporters on Wednesday. “This team has been doing it for seven years. Your core group doesn’t overreact. It’s pretty even keel. As much as you see some loud noises, you got to just truck ahead and stay focused. But as far as anything else, there’s no real way to tell.”
All of that may have been to say that Toews isn’t exactly sure of the particulars of Chicago’s nip-andtuck success.
“We don’t like to talk about that,” Toews said. “Just keep going. Hopefully it keeps following us around.”
That’s another way of saying, of course, that Tuesday’s game couldn’t have gone the other way. Sami Vatanen, the Ducks defenceman, rifled no less than two slappers off the Chicago crossbar in overtime. Anaheim had 27 scoring chances to Chicago’s 20 in the three extra periods, according to war-onice.com.
“To me, that game was a game I would look and say ‘Hey, man, we can play with these guys,’ ” Anaheim coach Bruce Boudreau told the media on Wednesday. “That’s the way I took it. That’s why I’m excited about getting on the plane and getting back at it.”
Late at night in Anaheim on Tuesday, mind you, nobody was thinking about Thursday’s Game 3 at the United Center. And it wasn’t just the players feeling the strain of a game that lasted, from opening faceoff to decisive goal, eight minutes short of five hours.
As one elevator attendant at the Honda Center was overheard saying, as he bid adieu to a group of co-workers walking into a California midnight: “I’m going home to soak my feet, for at least an hour.”