He had to think about it, but not very long.
Nope, Joffery Lupul has never had his name chanted in an NHL arena.
That it happened in his 523rd NHL game in his 10th NHL season was reflective of a goal that you’re not supposed to score in the best league in the world, at least if you’re not one of the handful of guys in the NHL who routinely get their named called out by 20,000 people as one.
But Lupul scored it, a 180-foot trail of highlight reel fodder that will be as important as any if the Leafs manage to stay among the top eight teams in the Eastern Conference and visit the post-season for the first time since 2003-04.
It was like an inspired moment of pee-wee hockey, except it could help change the fortunes — or at least the mood — of an entire city.
Lupul gathered a puck off the wall deep in his own zone, skated a half circle to pick up speed, hit stride in the neutral zone before going wide around overmatched Carolina Hurricanes defenceman Joe Corvo, who could only flail with his stick as Lupul blew past and cut in on goalie Justin Peters cutting a trail of ice shavings before stuffing it into the far side of the net.
Viewed another way it was a terrible play by the Hurricanes, who were soft on the puck and on Lupul in every zone, emblematic of why they’re sliding out of playoff contention themselves.
But it was a signature play by the Leafs alternate captain, who has stormed back after missing 25 games with a broken arm. It came two nights after he scored twice to help the Leafs win a losable game against the Florida Panthers.
His seventh goal in his last five starts lifted the Leafs out of a 3-3 tie with just over three minutes left on a night when Toronto had blown a two-goal lead they built in the first period and appeared poised to fritter away another precious point or more as Carolina took the lead in the third period.
That it came just a moment after Lupul had set up the tying goal on a slapshot from Dion Phaneuf at the end of an uncharacteristically expert Leafs power play made it that much better.
“Luupul-Luupul-Luupul” went the crowd a few moments later.
It was not something he heard in Anaheim or Edmonton or Philadelphia or even Toronto in a star-crossed career that appears to be unfolding into a pleasing second act.
“I heard it a little bit, yeah. It feels good,” said Lupul afterward. “Just winning feels good. But any time the fans recognize our effort or an individual’s effort, it feels pretty good and I want the fans to be part of the game. It makes it fun for the players, it makes it more fun to watch.”
The wind up to the goal had the building and the Leafs bench on the edge of their seats.
“When he cut around the D-men, my depth perception is pretty bad from my end,” said Leafs goalie James Reimer, who stopped 19 of 22 shots for the win. “I didn’t know if he had enough room to cut to the middle or not. Sometimes he tries to stuff it short-side cheese, and I was kind of like ‘oh, what’s he going to do?’ And sure enough he brought it around. It was a sick goal. Pretty impressive.”
It wasn’t lost on Leafs coach Randy Carlyle, who may be the most surprised person of all at the transformation of Lupul from the injury and illness plagued under-achieving former first-round pick he had with the Anaheim Ducks into a performer who — between injuries in Toronto — has arguably been the Leafs’ best player since the beginning of last season.
Lupul’s also not content to rest on the laurels of his breakout season last year or the $26-million contract extension he got at the start of this one. While out with an arm injury he met with Leafs skating coach Barbara Underhill to do edge work and stride technique four days a week for a month. It paid off as Lupul left the field in the dust on his goal.
“It’s a display of determination where an individual gets an opportunity to complete a play and that’s what he did,” said Carlyle. “He was determined and wasn’t going to take no for an answer and that’s nice to see when you have players like that capable of doing that in a tough situation. Not a lot of things were going right for us in the hockey game for a while, but they reached back and got some points for us.”
Earlier in the day the talk in the Leafs dressing room was — same as everywhere else in hockey — about the Calgary Flames’ decision to trade franchise icon Jarome Iginla and the Pittsburgh Penguins’ seemingly bottomless well of salary cap space.
“They’re loading up. Where are they getting all the money?” said Carlyle. “Everyone is asking that.”
And rightly so: Iginla is a first-ballot Hall of Famer being added to a team that has won 14 straight games already.
A quick glance around the Leafs room confirms that Toronto doesn’t yet have that kind of player that — at least based on what they have done to date — will live in Leafs lore. But a playoff appearance can help that cause and in Lupul and Nazem Kadri and even Phaneuf at times the Leafs have some players that seem capable of making big plays that look good in the archives decades later as long as they come with some team success.
Lupul takes the ACC crowd’s response to his goal as a team accomplishment and proof fans are beginning to recognize that this edition of the Leafs is a distant relative of the one that fell so dramatically out of playoff contention last season — a slide exacerbated by Lupul missing the last 16 games of the year with a shoulder injury.
“We were confident we were going to win the game the whole time. That’s a sign of our team maturing,” said Lupul. “We get in these tight games — last year we probably wouldn’t have won that game and this year we did. We’re maturing as a hockey team and we had guys step up and make big plays.”
Thursday night it was Luu-pul.