ST. LOUIS — Lindy Ruff has been around a long, long time. Which, in turn, has left him a damned good coach. Good enough to be in the Jack Adams talk for the NHL’s coach of the year award, the finalists for which come out Thursday night.
There’s no scheme that St. Louis coach Ken Hitchcock could dream up that Ruff won’t have an answer for, and vice versa, as two old Alberta-bred coaches with more than 2,800 regular season games coached between them push and pull over whose preferred style dictates the way this series is played.
We thought this to be true when the series began, but now we are certain: Dallas isn’t going to win at St. Louis’ heavy, forechecking game. And the Blues can’t beat Dallas’ at the “score off the rush” game the Stars prefer.
So this series stands at 2-1 for St. Louis. But really, we’ve watched two games played St. Louis’ way, and one for Dallas. So it’s more like, Hitchcock 2, Ruff 1.
If the Stars can’t speed this thing up tonight — or, if Ruff can’t coach his way out of the box like St. Louis put Dallas in during Game 3 — the end will be in sight.
“We take a lot of pride in trying to maintain possession. They’re trying to disrupt that,” Ruff acknowledged prior to Game 4. “When we’re playing good you’ll see four guys when they hit the line … and the defence involved.
“Our forwards, they didn’t get back in the right areas fast enough (in a 6-1, Game 3 loss). It’s a five-man job, breaking out of your end. We didn’t race back fast enough to get into position.”
Ruff, a Warburg, Alta., native, has been kicking around this league since he played his first game as a Buffalo Sabre in 1979, so he’s heard all the clichés. Like the one that says it’s easier to lose 6-1 than 3-2, as if somehow there is a difference.
“I thought we embarrassed ourselves with some of our play, so the answer to the question is, yeah, I don’t want to lose 6-1. The result is the same, but the pain is greater,” he said. “And maybe we needed that. If it’s only 3-1 maybe we thought … we played well. We didn’t play well last game. I’m not going to sugar-coat it. We deserved to lose 6-1, the way we played.”
Here’s something else Ruff isn’t used to: Going down the playoff trail with goaltending as untrustworthy as what the two-headed Finnish lion of Kari Lehtonen and Antti Niemi have given him.
He wouldn’t talk about it at a time like this, as Ruff hesitantly starts Lehtonen in Game 4 (we surmise) after having yanked his starter in each of the past two games — Lehtonen in Game 2 and Niemi in Game 3. But Ruff always had a Dominik Hasek, a Ryan Miller or a Martin Biron between the pipes when he coached in Buffalo.
And in his heart of hearts he has to know that whatever system he employs, and no matter how well his players execute it, if the Stars don’t start getting some saves nothing else is going to matter.
Yes, Dallas gave up 39 shots in Game 3, and that’s an issue. But a team saves percentage that has dipped to .889 is a bigger, more crippling issue.
Ask Pittsburgh about what it takes to beat a good team, even after your No. 1 (Marc-Andre Fleury) is forced from the net with a concussion. Winning teams get the kind of heroic goaltending that Matt Murray is giving the Pens. Teams that lose get what Lehtonen and Niemi are giving the Stars.
Ruff, of course, would give anything to have a Murray in his quiver. Or perhaps even a Jeff Zatkoff. Former first-round pick Jack Campbell is here, but the fact his name isn’t coming up tells you what you need to know about his status with Dallas.
Ruff could never admit the obvious, that the goaltending will undermine Dallas if it doesn’t improve. A coach’s job is to make his team believe that they’ve faced this adversity before and will overcome it. That this is nothing new.
On that front, he remains utterly defiant.
“I know that’s hard for you (media) guys to buy into, because this two goalie thing is new to you guys and you’d rather just ask me about one goalie,” he said in the lead up to Game 4. “We’ve had two goalies that have played really well that have got us to where we are. And last time I checked, it was in a pretty good place.
“Do they stumble every now and then? Yeah, they do. But the alternative is I have another guy to go to all of the time. They’ve bought into the way we’re doing it, and it’s led us to this point. What we do from this point on will be determined by (Game 4).”
He’s playing the piano as fast as he can on that front. But that’s all right.
It’s what a good NHL coach does best.
