Posted by At some point before the first puck dropped on Tuesday night, someone must have asked the thing that was on everybody’s mind in and out of the St. Louis locker room:
Are they going to go there?
If there was any question of their commitment to do that, it was answered 52 seconds into first period when David Backes laid a dirty hit on Joel Ward. As Weber and Suter served up one slap shot after another to defanged Blues goalie Chris Mason, the Blues kept the hits coming, knocking Kevin Klein completely out of the game and trying hard to see what kind of licking it would take to stop Franson from ticking. In the meantime, The Men in Blue were winning faceoffs and giving Ain’t Louis a run for their money.
Where were the refs during all of this? You tell me. Even Preds announcer Terry Crisp, who strikes me as someone who would tell a player who was holding up a severed finger to walk it off, was registering his disbelief that so many possible penalties were flying right by the graduates of The Lighthouse School for the Referees.
Was it a massacre? In some ways, it was. The Blues’ play was pig snot dirty. While some people were trying to actually play hockey, others were seeking some hot knee on knee action with Hornqvist and Erat. Do I have to name names here? You pervs know who you are. The usual cast of characters (Goc, Ward, Hornqvist) was making Mason blush and cover his five hole. But you could still see signs that the game was getting too personal on the team’s ire-ometers: the veins on Arnott’s neck stuck out, Sullivan looked like he wanted to cut someone and every time the camera showed Legwand, he was talking.
When Belak was knocked blades over breadbasket into the bench and Jackman made Dumont see stars for about five minutes, it was easy to wonder where the Agents of Karma had gotten off to. It didn’t take long to see them at work. Dumont, who looked to be a sure thing on IR for the next game made it clear he would get back on the ice for his next shift if he had to knock Trotz flat and storm the rink naked, painted blue and brandishing a sword in one hand and the severed head of Louie the Polar Bear in the other. Even with that mindset going on in the offense, the real berseker behavior was yet to come.
Pekka Rinne went rogue.
I didn’t mistype that. You didn’t misread it. Pekka Freaking Rinne decided he’d had enough and was seen flexing and diving somewhere around one of the playoff circles. All over Nashville, dogs fled, cats looked offended and fish flipped belly up as fans screamed and waved their arms, urging The Great Wall of Finland to get his tuchus back between the pipes. It must have worked, because he stopped threee more shots, denying the Bloos a chance for some overtime and sending the boys to Columbus blooded and happy.
I’ll give the last word on this game to William Wallace J.P. Dumont: “We play as a team. We win as a team. We lose as a team.”
Darn skippy. Over and out until next year, or as they call it in Nashville, tomorrow.
Jas Faulker is a Nashville based writer and artist. Her blog is called Confessions of a Cheese Grits Fiend
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