ST. LOUIS — Inside hockey dressing rooms, they call it “Choppin’ down the tree.”
You don’t bring down a 50-foot Tamarack with one swing of the axe, and you don’t force a mistake out of a defenceman as good as Duncan Keith with a single body check.
So, come playoff time, the metaphor plays out like this: If you take every opportunity to put a bodycheck on the other team’s best defenceman starting from the first period of Game 1, by games 5, 6 and 7 the rewards start coming. Enough whacks, and even the biggest tree will fall.
“I’ve played hockey my whole life where guys have been taking runs at me,” Keith said, upon his entry into this Round 1 series against the St. Louis Blues. “You just deal with it.”
Chris Pronger was that guy too, for 1,167 games and another 173 in the playoffs. He is retired today, a Hall of Famer whose body only now is recovering from the axe swings that buckled it over the years.
“It’s not like (Keith) gets hit a lot. He moves the puck fast enough where he’s not being hit,” Pronger said. “But you’re still going to take a hit to make a play. There are just times when a player of his hockey sense understands, ‘I’ve got to take this hit now, because I’ve got to (make a certain play).’
“After a while, it grinds on you. You want to get a lick back. He’s just got to figure out how best to do that without using his stick.”
Keith, like Pronger, fired back now and again. There was a five-game suspension for elbowing Daniel Sedin one night in 2012, and he received only a game when he high-sticked Jeff Carter in the face from behind a year later. Then, near the end of this season, Keith reacted to a hit that left him on his back, swinging his stick at the face of Minnesota’s Charlie Coyle.
There was zero subtlety in the act, just a vile, stick-swinging that reverberated through the hockey world. It’s 2016 and thankfully, hockey doesn’t do stick-swinging anymore. Keith received a six-game ban from which he returns Friday night.
“I don’t change my game at all. I don’t base my game on a high stick or anything. I compete hard … and that’s what I’m going to do (on Friday),” Keith said Thursday afternoon. “When it comes to my suspension, yeah, it’s something I can be in control of.”
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Pronger is hemming and hawing. The question was this: “Of the eight suspensions you received in your career, did you regret any of them?”
“Did I regret any of them?” he repeats, buying some time for the sympathy to gush forth. Predictably, it never arrives. “Aw, I don’t know… I mean, you feel bad for guys but… The Dean McAmmond suspension, I’ll say to this day, he leaned into it.”
The nine-year anniversary of that elbow to McAmmond’s noggin is upcoming, and even Pronger realizes, there is little point in debating his role is it. “That’s the way I played,” he concludes. “And apparently people liked it.”
Who doesn’t love the way Keith plays? Whether it’s for the Blackhawks — for whom he has won three Stanley Cups, two Norris Trophies and a Conn Smythe Trophy — or Canada’s Olympic team, where he’s been a core player in two gold medals.
He runs the powerplay, is heavily leaned on to kill penalties, and led the Blackhawks with an average of 25:15 of ice time nightly during the regular season.
In turn, to use hockey terminology, he gets “run.”
“Any time you get licks on defencemen … you’re trying to send a message, wear people down, make people make mistakes,” said Blues head coach Ken Hitchcock, whose team registered 40 hits in a 1-0 overtime win in Game 1.
After the game, Hitchcock said that wasn’t enough. He wants 70.
“This time of year, for two months of the year, everyone finishes their checks. It doesn’t matter who you are,” he explained the next day. “At this time of year, if you think body contact is going to make a player scared, or petrified or bail out, it’s not going to happen. But it might force a player to put (a puck) in a bad area. That’s what we’re looking for.”
Choppin’ down the tree. That hit in Game 2 plays a part in that mistake in Game 6, or so the theory goes.
On the other side, however, it is incumbent on Keith to make players wary. A blatant stick to the face, or some ham-handed, territory-marking act of violence doesn’t float anymore, not in the way it did in Pronger’s day, a time before the very Department of Player Safety for which Pronger now works (in a delicious bit of irony).
“No, the game has evolved. The latter part of my career, I couldn’t do it,” Pronger admits. “I was always told to be unpredictable, because it gave you more space. If they don’t know whether you’re going to hit ‘em, slash ‘em, crosscheck ‘em… If they don’t know, and you don’t know, it’s going to give you an edge, right?”
Hockey history is dotted with star players who snapped in their own defence at one time or another — who “protected” themselves.
Today, Keith is asked to take the slings and arrows of yore, without availing himself of the defence mechanisms available to players like Pronger.
“Quick puck movement is the key to his game,” Pronger observes. “Distributing (the puck), then moving his feet and getting up in the play.”
That’s Keith’s plan. But the Blues will bring their axes to Game 2, and they’ll be choppin’.
“If we can get him to react,” said St. Louis’s Kevin Shattenkirk, “get him to maybe get suspended another few games, it would be better for us.”
