EDMONTON — It’s always a long, dusty road to get to that intersection of Preparation St. and Opportunity Ave. And sometimes, when you finally get there, the lights are busted. Or you read the damned map wrong, and you’re pointing south, not north.
In the real life National Hockey League those “long road” stories don’t always have a Hollywood happy ending. So when apprentice Laurent Brossoit stepped in for injured Cam Talbot, his first big chance to be an NHL No. 1, we wondered:
Is this the Disney moment?
After all those games in all those leagues — BCHL, WHL, ECHL, AHL, NHL — from the cold obscurity of the Alaska Aces to the barbecue of a basketball town that is Oklahoma City, is this where a minor-league caterpillar turns into a big-league butterfly?
Well, on Saturday night in Calgary Brossoit had his second start since Talbot went down. On Monday morning, Jim Matheson’s lede in the Edmonton Journal story said it all: “OK, now what?”
“I assess the game honestly, and there were goals I wasn’t happy with,” Brossoit said of a 7-5 Oilers in Calgary, where he nearly blew a 6-1 lead with 15 minutes to play. “I wouldn’t be in the league if those were goals I was happy with.
“I played the score, and learned a lesson. I’ll be better for it.”
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Brossoit is just 24. When the Oilers gave up on Devan Dubnyk it was 2014, a full decade after they’d made him the 14th-overall choice in the 2004 draft.
Dubnyk was nearly 28, and had failed miserably at his big chance. His confidence had more holes than a Trump alibi, and three other teams would give up on Dubnyk before he resurrected himself in Minnesota.
Brossoit isn’t there yet, but here’s the reality: Philadelphia is in town Wednesday, the Oilers are desperate to win a home game against a team that has dropped 10 straight, and undrafted 23-year-old Nick Ellis — Brossoit’s backup — has yet to play his first NHL minute.
This intersection is a two-way stop: Either the Oilers show faith in Brossoit, or they start Ellis — or a goalie they trade for in the next 48 hours — and tell the world they’re moving on from the guy they call L.B.
“Certainly rebuilding L.B. right now is one of our goals,” said head coach Todd McLellan.
So coach, do you know who gets the start Wednesday?
“I don’t at this point. We’ll get through (Tuesday) and go from there.”
(Gulp.)
Brossoit was a little better than OK against Toronto Thursday, and pretty good with limited work for two dominant Oilers periods at Calgary Saturday. But with the score 6-1, he opened up.
Sam Bennett and Johnny Gaudreau scored bad-angle goals from below the circle. A couple wrist shots whistled past, and Edmonton was clinging to a 6-5 lead in a game it had led by five moments before.
“You know what it came down to? I let my body cool off,” he said Monday. “In a situation like that, where we take full control, I know next time to just be sure I’m ready to go both mentally and physically.”
After a day off Sunday, on Monday morning the job of patching up the young goaler’s psyche fell to his veteran teammates. Guys who all know that Brossoit is the best option currently, and they can’t beat Philly if he isn’t feeling like a winner.
“We’ve just got to let him know, we’ve all been there. We’ve all had off nights, or plays that haven’t gone our way — especially early in our career,” said Mark Letestu, who doesn’t have to reach back very far to Kris Russell’s own-goal for a talking point. “Rusty — perfect example. He had a tough night, owned it, came back and had a great night against Calgary two nights later.”
This is what team sports are about, right? Reaching down that proverbial mountain, extending a hand for the guy who might be falling behind. Tightening the group; sharing the tough times.
“It’s not all on him,” said Letestu, a fourth-line guy who is a true leader inside this room. “The weight he’s probably carrying, finally getting an opportunity to show what he has, and maybe it doesn’t go his way … I’ve talked to him about keeping it big picture. Don’t let 10 minutes of a hockey game define you. The other 50 minutes were pretty good.”
And once the kid gets sorted out, it’s time to address the rest of the team.
“As a leadership group you have to say, ‘Hey, he’s going to be all right. He’s going to be fine.’ As a leadership group there’s a role to be played there. Let’s all get behind this guy, and get ‘er goin’.”
Preparation St. and Opportunity Ave.
Sometimes, it’s a pretty rough neighbourhood.
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