Every week we will recap the most interesting things we learned from Road to the Winter Classic, our televised countdown to the New Year’s Day outdoor showdown between the Dallas Stars and Nashville Predators at the Cotton Bowl.
Saros pays tribute to fantastic Finns with custom mask
Nashville goaltender Juuse Saros started brainstorming ideas for a fresh mask paint job way back in the summer, wanting to unveil something special for the outdoor event.
The 24-year-old Finn landed on a tribute to two of the most accomplished countrymen in franchise history. On one side of the new bucket is a portrait of beauty Kimmo Timonen, who skated eight years in Music City. On the other is the image of his crease-mate and friend Pekka Rinne, replete with bowtie.
Episode 2 opens with Saros showing the art to “Peks.” Cool moment.
Stars goaltender Ben Bishop, too, commissioned a mask makeover for the occasion. While Bishop should be considered the presumed starter in the home net, Saros, 24, has a shot at supplanting the 37-year-old Rinne as the go-to goalie in Nashville this season.
Saros is 5-7-3 with a .894 save percentage, while the best goalie in Preds history has slipped to an uncharacteristic .892.
’Tis the season to make children smile
A series of this episode’s clips drill home the message that hockey players care about the community. The show does take place at Christmastime, after all. Giving SZN.
So, we see the affable Bishop picking up some children whose home was flattened by the tornado that ripped through his North Dallas neighbourhood in October. He decks them out in fresh Stars gear and takes them to a practice, where they get to share the ice with Jamie Benn, Tyler Seguin, John Klingberg and the rest.
We also watch new Star Joe Pavelski chuckle as he helps out with his nine-year-old son Nate’s high-level minor-league squad.
In Nashville, Mattias Ekholm and his fiancée run an on-ice camp that introduces Southern kids to the sport. And Austin Watson and Colton Sissons take time on an off day to give back to local kids.
Watson and his girlfriend are filmed gushing over their beautiful two-year-old girl Olivia, who looks to give daddy fist bumps through the glass during warm-ups.
It’s cute stuff, and it’s genuine. Yet the vignette operates without acknowledgement of the elephant in the room. The documentarians ignore the ugly events of last winter that saw Watson suspended 18 games for domestic assault.
The breezy, surface-level nature of these feel-good off-ice scenes reminds the audience to treat Road to the Winter Classic only as what it’s become: a pretty-looking advertisement for a hockey game.
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Much too early to count out Nashville
Much better is the candid, behind-the-scenes hockey footage and mic’d-up action that made the original HBO production so compelling and raw. We’d prefer more of that.
The last division you want your club to belong to is the Central, where the standings jumble weekly, and the competition is so fierce that the division could swipe both playoff wild cards and still leave a worthy roster on the outside.
The Predators’ critical 3-0-1 pre-holiday road trip culminates with a gutsy overtime victory in Boston. As he slaps on the goofy mullet hat in the visitors’ dressing room at TD Garden, OT hero Ryan Ellis stands up to address his teammates.
“We’re in a dogfight here, boys. Just keep workin’,” Ellis says. “We’re comin’ back.”
D.J. Smith’s Senators get a sweet shoutout
In pre-scouting the Flames, Stars assistant coach John Stevens is studying Calgary’s D-zone breakout. He pauses the tape with a Calgary defenceman holding the puck behind his own net to deliver this interesting aside to interim head coach Rick Bowness:
“See what Ottawa did against that the other night? The forward swung with the deep guy and the defenceman swung like a forward with the first guy. Right up on him. They’re doing some things that are really different.”
Nice little shoutout to D.J. Smith.
It is when the cameras allow us a glimpse into these details, these normally private chats, that the program hits the right note.
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