If you didn’t see the game and just caught the final score, you’d imagine that Erie’s conference-clinching win was just another Connor McDavid light show. His five points in the Otters’ 7-3 victory over the Soo Saturday night would certainly qualify as that. By the third period every time he touched the puck you were looking for the disco ball to descend from the rafters.
There was more to the story than that, though, and I suspect that it will be forgotten in too short a time. The winner of the Oshawa-North Bay series in the Eastern Conference will go to school on this game. So too will any other team that might face Erie if the Otters get to the MasterCard Memorial Cup in Quebec.
The lesson that they’ll draw from the game isn’t what to do against McDavid but rather what not to do. Rest assured: As much as McDavid shone, the Greyhounds lost this game and wasted an opportunity to take this to Game 7 back in the Soo.
A few weeks back I talked to Marty Williamson, the coach of the Niagara IceDogs, who twice managed to hold McDavid without a point during the regular season — more remarkable than it sounds, given that these were the only two games that the wunderkind was held off the scoresheet. When I asked Williamson how his crew pulled it off, the first thing he cited was basic and sensible and yet so hard to do.
“Stay out of the penalty box,” Williamson said.
Williamson had other points that he’d write up on his white board when in against Erie but none of them would have mattered very much if his team didn’t abide by the rule.
I’m sure it was a point that Greyhounds coach Sheldon Keefe tried to drill home in the run-up to each game in this series. Last night any directive along these lines seemed utterly lost on the Soo, for most of this season the top-ranked team in the CHL.
The Otters had five power plays and scored three goals with a man-power advantage, each of them sucking the oxygen right out of the visitors’ lungs. With the game 2-all early in the second period, the Soo seemed to be taking the play to Erie. Then Greyhound winger Hayden Verbeek came cruising in from the right wing, bore down on the Otter goal and, when the puck rolled past the net, slew-footed Erie netminder Devin Williams. Williams was knocked for about two full revolutions before crashing to the ice. The zebras seemed to not notice this — neither ref had an arm up. When the whistle was blown dead, they met in a conference and wound up handing Verbeek a deserved major-and-game. At the end of that five minutes, Erie led 4-2, the first goal coming with McDavid setting up Alex DeBrincat, the latter with McDavid on a wrap-around.
The only thing more sensible than staying out of the penalty box against McDavid and Erie is staying out of the penalty box for five minutes at a time.
In the last five minutes of the second period the Greyhounds surged again and you thought the lead wasn’t safe. When Soo defenceman Darnell Nurse scored four minutes into the third to pull his team within a goal, you thought the game was destined for a nail-biter finish. Penalties, though, undid the visitors once again and for the last time this night, series and season.
A couple of shifts later Soo centre Michael Bunting, who had a good night otherwise, took a wholly unnecessary interference penalty on Williams that gave the Otters a chance to kill some clock and steady their nerves. Then Greyhound blueliner Gabe Guertler took a holding penalty that led to another power-play goal, this time by right winger Nicholas Baptiste on a slick pass right through traffic by McDavid. Watching the game you had a real sense that the Soo had the balance of play in five-on-five situations — at least until the late stages when the Hounds were done for. Even penalty-killing situations that didn’t wind up hurting them on the scoreboard still left their best players gassed.
No team is going to come at the Otters with more elite talent than the Greyhounds, who have four first-round NHL draft picks and two second-rounders. Erie’s opponent in the OHL championship series is bound to take a more disciplined approach than the Soo did on the night of their exit.
Rule No. 1: Be disciplined. Rule No. 2 and the rest don’t matter in the absence of Rule No. 1.