AJC > Sports > Thrashers > Blog > Archives > 2007 > December > 21
Friday, December 21, 2007
Best win or most frustrating?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This blog would have come sooner, but evidently everybody in Atlanta left work at lunch today and it took me two hours to get home from the Thrashers practice facility. I take it a lot of Christmas vacations are starting today. Thankfully I’m not traveling until Sunday to cover the game in St. Louis. Hopefully the craziness slows down by then.
There’s not much more that can be said about last night’s win that hasn’t been said. It was a complete win - every line played well. The team got great goaltending from Kari Lehtonen, who will start again Saturday (and possibly Sunday if he keeps getting better). After the excitement of a good win died down, part of me started wondering - where has this effort been all season? Listen, I’m not going to get negative in the middle of a two-game winning streak in which the team is playing its best hockey of the season, but why does this team consistently back itself into a corner before playing good hockey?
Don Waddell wasn’t about to question the effort before last night, but I asked him about it this morning anyways.
Me: When you see the team play as well as it did last night, obviously you’re happy, but isn’t part of you like ‘where was that effort…’?
DW: No, we’ve seen the parity in the league. Have we given that effort every night? No. Sometimes the circumstances dictate it too. We really played well on Tuesday night, we had a lot of confidence coming out of Tuesday night heading into this game. We also had something - we’re 0-3 against that team, so we knew this would be the last time we’d see them during the regular season, so I think we wanted to prove something that we could play with them.
Me: So that’s the team amping up their effort, taking it to another level, wouldn’t you want to say, ‘Guys, do that every game?’
DW: We’re going to try, obviously. Sometimes too, games, you don’t get the tempo depending on the power play or the penalty kill. We were good, we didn’t get a penalty until the third period which enables you to get the guys all in the game. Sometimes they take their power plays and we take our penalties and that [fourth] line doesn’t get an opportunity to go as much. When we can play the fourth line on a regular basis, it gives our whole team a lot of energy.
Uh oh, what if the Lightning actually gets some goaltending? We all know Tampa Bay can score with anyone, but as long as goaltending was an issue, the Lightning would always be a flawed team. Evidently 21-year-old Finnish goalie Karri Ramo was sharp in his debut last night against Toronto. Here’s what he told the Tampa Tribune: “I wasn’t real nervous, I was kind of surprised,” Ramo said of his first career NHL start. “Wednesday night I got really good sleep and I didn’t stay up long, like it was kind of different than my first pro game in Finland. A couple of the first shots came and I started to feel pretty good. The first save is the hardest to make in a game, especially here, first game and guys are so much faster here so I feel that there was … just kept going, kept going and doing what I can.”
So who ultimately is going to be the best goalie from Finland in the Southeast? You know, that reminds me of a totally unrelated story. I was in Columbus covering the draft and the Thrashers selected Niklas Lucenius, a center from Finland. So I grab him after the selection and we’re chatting and I assumed every kid hockey player in Finland had a poster of Kari Lehtonen on his wall. That just shows my ignorance of Finland. So I ask him if he was excited to maybe one day play with Kari Lehtonen. And he goes, “Who?” He’d never heard of him.
If you’re traveling for Christmas, be safe. And have a good one.
