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Monday, April 16, 2007
Lehtonen’s Thrashers’ best hope
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Even if the Thrashers lose tonight, Bob Hartley made the right choice. When an organization works forever just to breathe the playoffs’ heady air, it can be hard to grasp that there’s life beyond this one postseason. But there is, and Kari Lehtonen will be a large part, maybe the largest part, of that life. Kari Lehtonen will be the goalie for this franchise long after this coach is gone.
During the first intermission of the Thrashers’ last regular-season game, their general manager called Lehtonen “a great young goaltender” and dismissed the notion that, for the playoffs, Hartley might choose Johan Hedberg instead. “It’s 100 percent [Lehtonen],” Don Waddell said. “No doubt about it.”
Come Game 2 of Round 1, Hedberg was the starter. Lehtonen hadn’t distinguished himself in Game 1 beyond dyeing his hair blue and then bleaching it blond. He let in four goals, the fourth being particularly soft. Still, his misplay wasn’t nearly as bad as Patrick Roy’s clanger in Game 4 of the 2001 Stanley Cup finals, and Colorado’s coach, one Bob Hartley, didn’t see fit to sit the great Roy for Game 5. And Roy, it must be noted, was 35; Lehtonen is 23.
Just as the Thrashers have waited forever to play a postseason series, they’ve waited just as long for a goaltender of Lehtonen’s class. (Indeed, the chief reason they hadn’t made the playoffs until Season No. 7 was because they kept looking for a Lehtonen and finding Damian Rhodes, Norm Maracle and Byron Dafoe.) As Hartley said Monday, “The sky’s the limit for this guy. With his talent, he can steal games.”
Tonight Lehtonen will seek to win, if not outright steal, the biggest game in Thrashers history. It’s the role he was drafted and nurtured to play. “I always want to be the guy to make a difference,” he said, and he’s capable.
Hartley is trying to win games in the here and now, which is what coaches do. (If they don’t, coaches get fired.) His explanation for benching Lehtonen: “We’re not going to sit there and watch the parade go by us.” But there will no Cup-winning parades this year or in the next 10 years if Lehtonen isn’t allowed to develop into a bona fide Playoff Goalie. Hedberg, who’s 33 and who played well enough in a Game 2 loss, is the backup for a reason: He’s simply not as gifted as Lehtonen. Few guys are.
To lose, perhaps even to get swept, in Round 1 would be disappointing. To damage a 23-year-old’s psyche because he had a shaky playoff debut would be the height of organizational folly. Wouldn’t Lehtonen have felt rotten if he’d gotten to play only Game 1? “Not if we win the Stanley Cup,” he said. “I always put the team first. But of course you’re not satisfied if you’re not playing.”
He admitted Monday he’d been “very down because of the decision” to start Hedberg in Game 2. After a rough couple of days, Lehtonen did “some thinking by myself at my place.” He steeled himself and practiced hard. And now? “The old Kari’s back.”
The one thing Lehtonen isn’t is old. There have been sudden goaltending successes in Stanley Cup annals — Ken Dryden in 1971, Roy in 1986, Cam Ward last year — and it’s not inconceivable that a sharp Lehtonen could yet turn this series. And if he doesn’t and the Rangers close this out in routine fashion, there will be other seasons and other series.
He’s playing tonight because he gives this team its best chance to win. The same will be true next year, and the year after, and the year after that. Even as Kari Lehtonen seeks to prop up the Thrashers’ present, he remains a pillar of their future.
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