Some teams make the most of clean slate
How can something that should be the same be so different?
In a normal year, it happens 82 times during the regular season. This time around, pandemic issues limited it to 56. And yet, once again, when the puck dropped for the first game of the 2020-21 NHL playoffs it immediately changed.
The first game saw Washington hosting Boston, and seconds into the action Caps superstar Alex Ovechkin, he of 730 career goals, launched his 240 pounds into unsuspecting Bruins star David Krejci and it was game on. You better believe everyone on both teams took note. As did all the anxious players sitting at home on their sofas, some of whom had to wait as many as six days until they would take the ice for their own playoff opener.
Every skilled guy saw himself in Krejci as the hittee and vowed to be ready for it. Every aggressive player loved Ovechkin’s actions and promised to do the same in their first game.
I speak from too much experience, having been the victim of a couple of huge post-season upsets. Looking across the ice at the upstart Rangers in my first playoff experience, I couldn’t figure out what all the excitement was about. We had finished 26 points ahead of them and somehow, in a few days between season’s end and the start of the post-season, we each had convinced ourselves of something else.
The series wasn’t close; we were swept convincingly. It was my first harsh lesson of what I learned to understand: In the playoffs, it’s different.
As much as you convince yourself you’re ready, you are still surprised. The intensity is elevated to a level that catches even veterans off guard. I played in 129 games over a 13-year career. You would have thought that much experience would clarify things, but it didn’t. Each year was electric. Each year was different.
Watching the first game between the Maple Leafs and Canadiens on Thursday night, I had the same thought process.
Everything that happened during the regular season seemed forgotten. Players on both teams looked up and saw that the scoreboard said 0-0. Each side knew that was all that mattered. The Rocket Richard winner as the league’s leading goal scorer, Auston Matthews, had the same number of playoff goals as every skater on the Canadiens: zero.
But then a frightening collision with Montreal’s Corey Perry left Leafs captain John Tavares injured and brought the building to a stop. The game was no longer important — thoughts were all about the health of a teammate and peer — but it had to continue, and the outcome wasn’t expected. Canadiens goalie Carey Price was in a form he hadn’t found for most of the regular season, and enough timely scoring — including a short-handed goal by Paul Byron versus the oncevaunted Leafs power play — provided the slim winning margin, 2-1 Montreal.
The Leafs couldn’t generate offence against a stingy, responsible foe, and what had carried them to the top of the North Division in the regular season simply didn’t show up in the first game of the playoffs. But it’s only one game. That’s the thing. An entirely new script writes itself each time out.
In the other matchup in the North, the second game was eerily like the first. The suddenly upstart Jets have silenced the best player in the league, the Oilers’ Connor McDavid, who sits with zero points, the same number as Hart-winning teammate Leon Draisaitl. How is that even possible? It’s the playoffs.
Across-the-board commitment to team defence is shining on the Jets’ side, and now the Oilers are tasked with winning four of five games to advance to the next round.
In two weeks, you can change whatever happened over the course of the year. It’s that simple. It’s a redo. It’s a clean slate — not only for teams, but for individuals.
Good playoff years are etched deeper into memory than anything you can do in the regular season. Reckless abandon is welcomed and encouraged. “Nothing to save it for” is a locker-room mantra. Controlled aggression is a secret recipe.
Imagine being able to erase an entire year of mediocrity in two weeks. Whatever disappointments you’ve had, whatever didn’t happen that was supposed to, everything is better if you win that first series.
It’s some sort of human equation: level of commitment over X length of time plus talent minus level of resistance — with a dozen more factors looming: coaching, travel, home ice, injuries, slumps, confidence ... and a sustained commitment to whatever it takes to win that surprises even those doing it.
It’s different.