ERIE, Pa. — Through three games of the Ontario Hockey League final, you might presume that this is a home-team series, the Oshawa Generals winning the first two games in their own barn, the Otters winning Game 3 down in Erie, Pa.
You might presume that the Generals can win if they hold off Erie’s wunderkind Connor McDavid, who registered one lonely point in the games in Oshawa but picked up a goal and a couple of assists back in friendly confines.
You might presume that Erie’s best chance to win will come if somehow McDavid can be shook free of the defensive pairing of Josh Brown and Dakota Mermis (plus-49 and plus-48 respectively this regular season), which was a struggle for Otters coach Kris Knoblauch when he didn’t have last change. That goes ditto for getting McDavid on the ice when centre Cole Cassels was on the Generals bench. And really that was the impression you took away from the first three games in the final, Knoblauch and Oshawa’s D.J. Smith sitting across from the chess board, waiting for the other guy to blink or budge. There were stretches of Game 3 when Knoblauch held back McDavid for four shifts, waiting to get him into the game with the right matchup. McDavid rolled over the boards for his first shift just as Cassels should have been at the end of his — Cassels was caught in his own end and ended up staying on the ice for a minute and 50 seconds.
All these are fair takeaways from the first three games and suggests that Erie is in position to square the series Wednesday night.
Watching these three games live and then on replay (one channel in Erie has shown replays of Game 3 in a continuous loop for over 40 hours) something else emerges: If the game is tight and orderly you have to like the Generals chances, but a sloppy game favours the Otters.
Strange as it may seem, the Otters played their sloppiest game in their one victory. There were a dozen painful turnovers, most of them unforced or against at best token pressure. Among the Erie forwards, Dylan Strome particularly struggled and along the blueline, well, everyone coughed up fur balls. For stretches, the home team created more chances for the Generals than they created for themselves.
Funny thing, such perilous situations and ham-handed puck handling opened up the game in both directions. In Oshawa, the Generals sent one man in on the forecheck with the other four skaters content to box up in the neutral zone. In Erie, though, the Generals had to like their chances of forcing turnovers or merely harvesting them, which is good when you score but opens up the ice behind you if you don’t. It was as if the Otters were able to get the Gens out of their game and into a quick-transition contest. Oshawa could probably beat 18 OHL teams going up and down the ice in a track meet, but you wouldn’t like the Gens chances getting away with it against Erie or the Soo, the team the Otters knocked out in the Western Conference final.
And let’s go back again to presumptions. Before it began, many thought of this series as the Generals versus Connor McDavid and the other guys. Predictable enough. By force of talent, McDavid can reduce very good players to “the other guys.” And watching these games unfold (or in the case of Game 3 unfold over and over again), you do see a significant separation in talent between the teams, at least when it comes to the bottom half of the roster. Even when you look at the top half you have to figure that the Generals, with the likes of Michael Dal Colle and Tobias Lindberg showing the way, probably have fix or six guys who would outstrip McDavid’s wingers Remi Elie and Alex DeBrincat. Age also separates the teams — a lot more minutes are logged by Erie’s ’97 and ’98 birthdays than by their contemporaries with the Gens.
For pure entertainment value you wish that Knoblauch would just roll McDavid over the boards and take his chances rather than stick with the line-matching in Game 4. After all, McDavid versus any junior in Canada right now amounts to a mismatch, advantage Erie. But coming off a win on Monday, I’m presuming the Erie coach isn’t going to mess with the formula.