The Marchand of menace strikes again for Florida
His breakaway goal ends a fabulous Game 2 and ties the Stanley Cup Final.
Every 14 years, he scores shorthanded in the Stanley Cup Final. You can set your watch to it, if you still wear one. The jerseys are different and so are the circumstances, and Brad Marchand, at 37, is a little different, too. Now he plays for the Florida Panthers, and when he swam upstream to beat Stuart Skinner in the second overtime Friday night, he won Game 2, 5-4, and tied the Final, 1-1.
Until this season’s trade deadline, Marchand had been a Boston Bruin, the soul and sometimes the spitball of the franchise, and on June 6, 2011 he came out of the pack to beat Vancouver’s Roberto Luongo. Now Luongo is an assistant to Florida general manager Bill Zito, who pursued Marchand when the Bruins decided to put their essential furniture in the front yard. Because the Panthers made the Final, the price for Marchand is a first-round pick. If that meant anything, Marchand wouldn’t be here, because he was a third-round pick of the Bruins and a bit of a load on a personal level. But he has 424 NHL goals and Friday was his 176th playoff game. More improbably, he stole a Game 2 that had belonged to Connor McDavid, hockey’s greatest showman. If you’re going to present one of the most riveting Final games in recent history, Marchand will find the unlocked stage door.
“Favorite player of all time,” Luongo tweeted.
“In Northern parlance,” said Paul Maurice, Marchand’s coach, “he’s a beauty.”
This time Marchand snatched victory from the open jaws of the Rogers Place crowd in Edmonton, which had begun celebrating when Niko Mikkola was penalized for hooking McDavid. Mattias Ekholm fired a shot from the left point, and the puck missed the net and bounced off the side boards and onto the stick of Anton Lundell who, with Eetu Luostarinen, has teamed with Marchand on a strong third line. Marchand took off immediately and Lundell shoved the puck at him, and suddenly he was bearing down on Skinner the way he did in the first period, on another breakaway goal. He tried to go forehand-backhand, and the puck traveled through the five-hole, and for a second Marchand and Skinner were the only men in the building who knew it was over.
It was Marchand’s 10th goal in his Final career. That leads all active players and broke a tie with Corey Perry, who had created these overtimes with a goal that begged belief. Luostarinen had Perry wrapped up like a boa constrictor, but “The Worm” somehow got his right hand free and flicked Jake Walman’s rebound past Sergei Bobrovsky. The goal happened with 17 seconds left in regulation, the latest to tie a game in the history of the Final.
Those were only two of the Kodak moments in this one. Skinner made a toenail save against Marchand, just as Bobrovsky did against Leon Draisaitl. Sam Bennett, natural enemy of goalies, scored while taking a push from Ekholm and flattening Skinner in the crease.
Late in the first period McDavid sized up his competition, turned around Selke Trophy winner Aleksander Barkov and Aaron Ekblad as if they were slalom gates, and fed Draisaitl for an easy goal while everyone else on the ice was reaching for a cellphone photo. McDavid gave Draisaitl a how-you-like-me-now raised eyebrow as the two hugged. Nearby, Evan Bouchard raised his arms and then helplessly rested his left hand on the top of his helmet, unable to digest it all.
If Game 1 raised the expectations for this rematch, Game 2 turned it into a French Connection pursuit. Fortunately there are two days to come back to earth before Monday’s Game 3 at Florida. Fortunately for the fans, that is, because the players don’t seem to mind. The Oilers have talked about how much they love the long flights, for the card games and the chirping and the male bonding of it all. As for the Panthers, they were cracking wise in between the overtimes. “We were all calling out who was going to score,” Matthew Tkachuk said, “and I’m sure a lot of guys had Marchy.”
Marchand gets his shift-disturber persona naturally. His father Kevin once said he got into 30 fights in 30 junior hockey games. Brad, at 5-foot-9, had to be hostile to even get noticed, and he was already mobile and agile. He was benched in an elimination game by his Halifax Mooseheads junior hockey team, a slight that he remembers to this day along with all the other ones. As a Bruin, he famously kissed Toronto’s Leo Komarov during a game — “I thought he wanted to cuddle,” he said — and licked the face of Tampa Bay’s Ryan Callahan during a playoff game.
Marchand rarely went to bed with a glass of milk when the games were over. The Bruins won that 2011 Final over Vancouver, and obviously Cup celebrations tend to last a few days, but Marchand was so wasted that he couldn’t even appear on the Bruins’ commemorative DVD.
Through it all Marchand sharpened his overall game and found serendipity with Patrice Bergeron and David Pastrnak. The “Perfection Line” was a constant in Boston, until it wasn’t. Bergeron’s retirement is a hole that wasn’t filled, and Marchand, an impending free agent, became irrelevant to the Bruins’ future, whatever that is. Florida, casting a line for more offense and for a player who would fit their general ebullience, made the call, and Marchand thanked the Panthers by scoring three goals with eight points in a 7-game elimination of Toronto, his longtime foil.
Maurice thinks experience, in all fields, is a tad overrated, but says it looms large in playoff series. He also says players of Marchand’s age can last longer because of all the nutritional and therapeutic tools. He says that with the knowledge that Marchand is busy gulping Dairy Queen Blizzards before games these days, in hopes of an endorsement. Maybe DQ can come up with something called The Breakaway and, by the way, do it ASAP. Five more games of this, and we’ll be looking at an energy crisis.