ST. LOUIS — It hurts to lose a playoff game. That much we know.
But it’s a real punch in the guts when you lose the way Dallas did, your worst fears exposed by a St. Louis Blues club that poured six goals past the two goalies you only halfway trusted when the series began.
Failing Finns Antti Niemi and Kari Lehtonen got bombed in a 6-1 Stars loss, and after the game it was a full-on protective bubble being built around the tandem by their coach and teammates.
“They’re not at the front of this one,” Dallas head coach Lindy Ruff said of his goaltending.
And what alternative does he have?
The Stars didn’t play well enough to win, allowing 39 Blues shots and a mitt full of odd-man rushes along the way. But these are the playoffs, and the teams that win get bailed out by their goaltenders along the way.
Niemi and Lehtonen have been bailing all right, but not in the same sense of the word.
“It hasn’t been a goalie issue, really,” said Stars defenceman Alex Goligoski. “We’re giving up some big chances, at bad times, early in games. We’re putting pucks in places we’re not supposed to, and they’ve been a little harder on some battles and put ‘em in the back of our net, so give them credit.
“But losing confidence in our goalies is not an issue. It’s our game.”
The Stars came into the series knowing that their goaltending could be the flawed transmission that stalled an otherwise Indy-worthy car, and that fear is absolutely playing out.
Ruff pulled Lehtonen after a first period in which he allowed three goals on the first five shots in Game 2, and then yanked Niemi in Game 3 when he gave up three goals on 12 shots. Lehtonen came on in “relief” Wednesday, and the Blues poured another three past him on their way to their most convincing win of the spring.
Did you get enough saves, Jamie Benn?
“We got a lot of saves, actually,” the Stars captain countered (and you may be spotting a theme here). “The score could have been a lot worse. I think they almost put up 40 shots (39). Lehts did a great job of coming in there.
“Couple of bad bounces for him, but he made some huge saves for us.”
If we may trot out a bit of a cliché, the pertinent one is this: they say that goaltending is 75 per cent of the game — unless you don’t have any. Then it’s 100 per cent.
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That surely is the case for the Stars, who entered the game with a playoffs-worst team save percentage of .897, and then saw their goalies stop 33 of 39 shots Tuesday night. Goaltending like this erodes a team’s confidence, and a team without sky high confidence does not win series in Round 2 against a club as good as St. Louis.
Meanwhile the Blues enjoyed their first six-goal game of the playoffs, their first comfortable blowout, and executed every facet of head coach Ken Hitchcock’s game to perfection.
“This is the game that we wanted to play all the way through,” said winger Troy Brouwer, who had a goal and an assist. “We kept pushing, we kept attacking, getting pucks forward, making sure that we weren’t sitting back, weren’t giving the chances to try to create offence off the transition.”
Alexander Steen had two goals and so did captain David Backes, who has shed his playoff reputation with a vengeance, scoring five times in 10 playoff games.
Lord knows who Ruff will choose for Game 4, but when it came to prayers Wednesday those were being reserved for the folks up in Blues winger Scottie Upshall’s hometown of Fort McMurray, Alta., a city being ravaged by fire as we speak.
“I know we’re playing hockey, but a lot of us that are born in Alberta,” said Hitchcock, raising the topic without being asked at his post-game press conference. “Our thoughts and prayers right now are for the people of Fort McMurray. The fire’s in the town, and obviously Uppy’s from there. We’ve all been there many times.
“So as much as this is a hockey game, a lot of our thoughts, especially us born and raised in that province, are with the people in that town.”
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The NBC TV crew gave a shout out to Fort Mac as well, where Upshall’s brother and fiancée had come down from to watch some playoff hockey. Upshall told me after the game that he’d be up half the night talking with his mom and nieces who had been evacuated.
Everyone was safe, to his knowledge.
