NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The Nashville Predators took the biggest risk there is in sports: They threw the party before they had anything to celebrate.
Such hubris is the stuff of 100,000 hurtin’ songs, except no one in Nashville calls it “hubris” because it doesn’t rhyme with anything since the retirement of Dainius Zubrus.
The Predators tempted fate but didn’t get stung in a well-deserved 5-1 win over the Pittsburgh Penguins in Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final at a rockin’ Bridgestone Arena. Defenceman Roman Josi showed the way for the home team with a goal and two assists in the second period.
It wasn’t exactly a house party that the Predators threw because it spilled out into the closed-off streets around the arena with a free pre-game concert featuring Alan Jackson, the country and western powerhouse. His fans and the Predators’ legion took Jackson’s best-known hit to heart from breakfast on: It’s Five O’clock Somewhere. Suffice it to say that people who have been around the league three or four decades were talking about the scene on Saturday being like no other they had ever experienced. And if hockey media types have debatable expertise about the game, years in the business qualifies them as expert witnesses when it comes to public displays of alcohol-fuelled incoherence.
It carried over when 17,000 were poured into the arena. They were on their feet, attempting to set a stadium record for volume of their cheers—and that was just during the warm up. Many will make the case that the home cheers don’t really register with the players but it was a point of conversation among the players once they could hear each other. “It was unbelievable,” goaltender Pekka Rinne said. “We came back to the dressing room … and we’re telling everybody we haven’t seen anything like that.” Added Nashville coach Peter Laviolette: “It seems to escalate as the playoffs go on.”
The Penguins had designs on spoiling the party and quieting the crowd. Pittsburgh’s Chris Kunitz talked about the necessity of playing “a boring road game.” Now you could make a case that, on style and strategy, the Penguins played a couple of boring and at times stultifying road games at their PPG Paints Arena to take a 2-0 lead in the series. You could even say that this has been their method through three rounds of the playoffs to this point.
Kunitz and his teammates repeated a party line holding that “a quick start was crucial to taking the crowd out of a game.” Easier said than done — 99 per cent of the crowd at the Preds’ barn wouldn’t quit until last call and at least four out of five would consider picking up where they left off in the parking lot.
Good to Kunitz’s word, the defending Stanley Cup champions set about sucking the oxygen out of the arena through the first eight minutes of action (or inaction). Less than three minutes in, rookie Jake Guentzel picked up his 13th goal of the post-season, fighting through the check of Predators’ defenceman Ryan Ellis to push a rebound from Ian Cole’s shot past Rinne. These were the first two shots that Rinne had to face and it might have looked like the netminder’s form was going to be as dicey as it had been in the first two episodes of the Cup Final. At 1-0 for Pittsburgh, the loneliest man in Nashville wore a mask and only wished it wasn’t water in his bottle. Well, the last bit is artistic license but the point is made.
Though Guentzel’s goal was the only one up on the scoreboard, you had more than a sense that the game turned in the home team’s favour midway through the first period — over that stretch, the Predators outshot the Pens 10-2 and had two or three five-star chances.
Early in the second, Harry Zolnierczyk, one of the depth players rotated in and out of Nashville’s lineup, drew a holding penalty on Justin Schultz. On the ensuing power play, Josi blasted a puck that slightly deflected off Carter Rowney’s glove, not giving Pittsburgh goalie Matt Murray much of a chance at getting his own mitt on it. Before Josi’s goal was announced, Frederick Gaudreau scored what turned out to be the winner, capitalizing on a turnover by Pittsburgh blue-liner Trevor Daley.
The crowd roared and then started to chant, “Murray, Murray / You suck / It’s all your fault.” Yeah, 17,000 and not one decent lyricist among them.
I’m not really sure how many of the Predators’ goals were Murray’s fault. James Neal’s in the dying seconds of the second period came out of a scramble, a defensive breakdown. Craig Smith made it 4-1 five minutes into the third but that was on a breakaway a shift or two after Murray turned aside Gaudreau on a breakaway of his own. By the time Mattias Ekholm made it 5-1 on a power-play blast, it was a moot point.
It’s hard to lay any blame on Murray, given that going into Saturday night’s game he had a 5-1 record in the playoffs with a 1.54 GAA and a .943 save percentage. Saturday night he was beaten five times on 34 shots. You wondered if Pittsburgh coach Mike Sullivan might pull Murray but he opted to give a vote of confidence to his No. 1 and spared him another snide serenade.
Ellis suggested that his team was in a good place with a shot at tying the series at two games apiece Monday. “We’ve been doing the same things the last three games [but it’s been a matter of] a little puck luck here and timely goals,” Ellis said. “We’ve liked our game in all three games.”
I couldn’t stick around for the entire Alan Jackson pre-game show. I’m not sure if his set list included his No. 1 hit, Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning). Seventeen thousand were on their feet believing they were seeing the series grind to a halt and start turning in the Predators’ direction.
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