Gare Joyce

Gare Joyce writes regularly on junior hockey for Sportsnet.ca. A veteran journalist, Joyce is the author of Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts, When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey's Cold War and Changed the Game and Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm. He also writes for ESPN The Magazine, espn.com and several Canadian magazines.

By rights, the Sudbury Wolves shouldn’t have even been in the game Wednesday.

Not that they couldn’t compete with the Eastern Conference regular-season champion Belleville Bulls. They shouldn’t have even made it into the playoffs. Teams that win just one of their last seven games shouldn’t expect too much. The Wolves’ own hopes of making the postseason had probably faded in the last week or so and they were resigning themselves with a season that would end last weekend. And it would have if one of the Oshawa Generals had been able to beat Brampton’s Thomas McCollum in a shoot-out on the season’s last day.

That, though, was just about what you’d expect if you caught games in the last month of the season. The battle between Peterborough, Sudbury and Oshawa for the last two playoff slots was a turtle race. You knew it would go down to the last shift of the last game—and in this case slightly beyond. You knew it would be a team backing its way in.

And so what happens? The Wolves took the Bulls right to the wall. The final score was determined after an empty-net clincher at 19:55 of the third: Belleville 3, Sudbury 1. After a goal by Akim Aliu midway through the second period the lowly eighth-seed had a lead against the home team. The Wolves had the Bulls in a flop sweat. Nick Palmieri tied the game on the very next shift but through the next 20 minutes or so, you’d have made the game no better than a coin flip. Goaltender Mike Murphy kept the Wolves at bay—a glove save he made on Sudbury’s John McFarland early in the third was as good as any that you’d see in the course of a season.

Even after Matt Tipoff gave Belleville the lead with a bit more than 10 minutes left in regulation, you had no sense that the Bulls were home and cooled out. A couple of bounces and Sudbury could have easily won the game.

The playoffs aren’t a continuation of the regular-season. They’re a second season unto themselves. And in the second season you are nothing without goaltending. As good as Murphy was, Sudbury’s Andrew Loverock was even better, stopping 35 of 37 shots. Based on Murphy’s regular-season stats (.941 save percentage, 2.08 GAA) and performance , Belleville should have the advantage in goal over everyone in the OHL with the possible exception of Brampton’s McCollum.

But those numbers and heroics looked pretty meaningless last night. If you had never seen them before, Loverock (3.67, .903, 20-21-3-3) looked as much an all-star and NHL prospect as Murphy Wednesday night. You might have thought it was Loverock and not Murphy who had signed a contract with the Carolina Hurricanes after the end of the OHL season. But that’s the difference between the regular season and the second season—in the former you have to be great consistently, in the latter you have to be great enough for a game or two.

With the exception of the masked marvels, the best player on the ice was Akim Aliu. Bit of déjà vu. The last time Aliu played in Belleville during the playoffs, he scored a soul-crushing goal in Game 5 of the 2007 Eastern Conference Final, a key moment in the Wolves’ series win. That was Aliu’s draft year and I was tracking him through a long stretch of the season for a story for ESPN The Magazine. Yup, he’s just another half-Ukrainian, half-Nigerian, Toronto-raised, Russian-fluent prospect.

Those who follow the OHL with even a casual interest know at least a few of the details of his story—the hazing incident and brawl with Steve Downie in Windsor, the highlight moments and shouting matches with Mike Foligno in Sudbury, residence in the Hunters’ doghouse in London, and finally, this season, most unlikely of all, a return in a trade to the Wolves and coach Foligno. Aliu has played for three teams and been suspended at each stop. If he lacked talent, nobody would be bothered with him just on his rep alone. But Aliu’s rep never was the whole story—clearly not if Mike Foligno re-acquired him.

Was he blameless for his troubles? Probably in Windsor, but not at the later stops. Misunderstood? Yup. What I wrote in 2007 remains true to this day. He is an extraordinary physical talent, a great skater, a tough kid. All of that. That’s why Chicago ended up drafting him in the middle of the second round a couple of years back. The downside or risk? Aliu was also relatively new to the game, learning to read play unfolding on the ice and feeling his way around the culture of the dressing room.

It’s hard to measure his progress from one season to the next—28 goals and 60 points in 61 games with London last season, 18 goals and 44 points in 45 games in 2008-09 split between the Knights and Sudbury. But for the first 58 minutes and 45 seconds last night, Aliu validated Chicago’s faith in him. The Bulls had no answer for him. On the big ice surface there was no chasing him. When he went wide down the wing, Bulls defencemen had trouble just laying a stick or glove on him.

Now you’re saying, "What about the last minute and 15 seconds?"

At that point, Aliu was hit with a minor for cross-checking, then another two minutes for unsportsmanlike conduct, and then a misconduct. This with his team down just a goal. The cross-checking penalty was a forgivable sin—it was nothing gratuitous. The others, though, were just acting out, complaining a little too loudly to the refs. The extra two and 10 hurt his team. If the Wolves had come back to tie the game—a longshot on a penalty kill, but still a chance with Loverock pulled—they were going to head to overtime without their best player (or, at the very least, their best player last night). The hill was already steep, Aliu just made it that much steeper. He has to know that, with the officials, his reputation precedes him.

Aliu, presumably cooled down, was saying the right things after last night’s game.

"We did a lot of good things out there," he told the Belleville Intelligencer. "I don’t think Belleville outplayed us. It doesn’t matter where we finished in the standings—we came out like a hungry hockey team."

It doesn’t matter where the Wolves finished in the standings or what Akim Aliu’s history is coming into the second season or into Game 2 tonight at the Yardmen Arena. With Games 3, 4 and, if necessary, 5 in Sudbury, Akim Aliu has a chance to build on those 58 minutes and 45 seconds. Through that stretch I was reminded of the impression he left two seasons ago: If he gets it, everyone else will be trying to get out of the way. If Mike Foligno, who knows Aliu better than anyone else in the game, trades for him, you know he believes that Aliu might get it after all.

Serious business at first … A correction to the story on Benjamin Rubin that appeared on this site earlier in the week. It was Rabbi Yaacob Levy who granted a dispensation to allow Benjamin an opportunity to play on the Orthodox Sabbath. Another rabbi, named in the piece, did not play a role in the dispensation.

Things that fell out of my notebook … Belleville coach George Burnett said that a flu bug has been running through the team. That might account for a sub-par effort … Don’t want to leave the impression that it was just a one-man show. McFarland hardly looked like a rookie out there. Eric O’Dell and Marcus Foligno looked solid too … Belleville struggled but Windsor sure made it look easy on the other side. Playing something less than their best game the Spitfires rolled over Owen Sound 7-4. The game was less competitive than the score suggests. Windsor jumped out to a 5-0 lead and then threw it into coast. That’s one No. 1 vs. No. 8 match-up that looks like it’s only going to go the minimum.