CrashingTheGoalie

by desertdawg

Tommy Larscheid calls it “learning how to win.”

I’d say it’s learning to be consistent. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a mental attitude that translate into winning hockey.
Every team goes through peaks and valleys, even the Detroits and the New Jerseys (check the results tonight). But the troubling fact about this latest version of the Canucks is the inconsistent nature of our work ethic on the road. We show flashes of effort…witness the first four and a half minutes of last night’s game. But then, much like a political promise, it just vanished into thin air. And by it, I mean intensity. This is the cap era of the NHL and we’ve heard the chant in the church of Bettman: on any given night, any one team can beat any other team.
And that includes tonight’s game in the mile high city. Reading colleague Ron Spence’s article on Jason LaBarbera, we find that LaBabs is oh-fer-six lifetime against the Avs. So would you have played him tonight? I have to side with Coach V on this one. We’ve been riding Roberto hard since the all star break. Calgary has done the same thing with Kipper and there are those (okay, me) saying that the Calgary tender is showing definite signs of fatigue late in the season. At least we have a decent back-up. If Kipper goes down Calgary performs like a bottom feeding lottery team.
So I think it’s important to give our big guy the night off in the back-to-back. Plus if the injury disaster hits us between the pipes again we have a goaltender who has played a few times during this calendar year. Not so for Calgary. And why do I care about Calgary? Well, it seems to me that just about everyone is picking us to be playing Chicago in the first round. My opinion, upon looking at the schedule, casting the bones from tonight’s chicken wings and then rolling the dice on the I Ching, is that we will be playing the Flames in the first round.
Of course, home ice advantage has yet to be decided. And that’s what makes tonight’s game so important.
And again, we are playing in the mile high city tonight. And that kind of altitude (especially on a back-to-back) will take its toll. Which means short shifts and intelligent decision making. Get the puck deep and punish the Avs in their own zone.
We come out much more cautious in the first period, or maybe we just don’t have our game legs. Lucky for us that the Avs are icing an AHL lineup tonight. Injuries have hit the Avs harder than anyone in the league…and that’s why they are in the Tavares/Hedman sweepstakes. And why we need to win tonight.
But the best thing we can say is that we look lethargic (disinterested being too much of an insult) and we pay for it when TJ Galiardi picks the corner on LaBarberra. We are down one, which is what happens when you play like you are on Phenobarbital.
It’s always hard to get the legs going in the first period of the second night of back-to-backs. We show a little life near the end of the period. I hate late penalties because a PP that extends to the new period sees cold legs and cold hands. They rarely succeed.
And our first PP in the second period does not succeed, but what I’m looking for is more urgency, more intensity. And five minutes in, I see a bit more…but I need to see lots more. The Avs have lost their last two games 8-1 and 7-2. Come on guys, we need to dig deeper. The PP we get from Guite’s hook is negated by a lethargic effort. I still don’t understand why Bernier replaces Burrows on the PP. There seems to be some myopic thinking going on…that we need the big body instead of one of the hardest working guys on the ice.
We fail…but we are showing signs of life, and that sends the Avs into penalty trouble. A broken stick play leads to a penalty shot…which Demitra just blows. Sorry, but that’s what happened. With that kind of effort you just give a guy like Raycroft confidence.
Distressing.
But we keep pressing and finally…finally…newly minted sniper Henrik Sedin gets us on the scoreboard. Let’s see how we respond to getting the bounce off the backboard.
And we respond with a too-many-men penalty. I think that is just the worst…I’ve said it before. No excuses for this kind of penalty…and we’ve had more than anyone else. We kill it easily, but this is a frustrating game. We are playing a bunch of no-names and they are outworking us.
A late PP proves my point as we get a couple of long shots, but I don’t see anyone paying the price in front of the net. Tied up after two periods.
And we open the period with a 5 on 3 advantage.

As I’ve often said, these are momentum killers when they don’t work, but Daniel comes through just as the first penalty ends. Again, we’ll see which team responds with the correct attitude.
And finally, our second line shows up for work. A sustained shift leads to a classic Mats Sundin set-up. This time Demitra makes no mistake and buries it. We are up by two.
We seem to be in control and start to relax. Which leads to two straight Avalanche PPs. We kill them both but the boys need to be told that the game is not over yet. But as the game winds down, we play the patient game and we look like a lock for the win. A late Sedins/Burrows shift sees Edler sneak in and we seal the deal.
So we beat the Lake Erie Monsters and we get the big W that gets us within one point of the Division crown. But I will tell you that if we play like this against Chicago, they will bury us.
Of course it is one of the great luxuries of life to be bitching about a win. We’ll take the two and move on.