Incredibly Thorough Game Review: Leafs 5 - Habs 2

Fuck this shit.

Pawn to Rook 4, Pawn to Rook 4! Nooooo! Why Don’t You Just Give him the King, Give it to Him! - Carey Price, 6 – Habs, 4

"He taught me the art of giving, as a boy growing up in Bangalore."

Not what you want to christen a west coast swing. In Seinfeldesque fashion, Carey Price’s performances found a way to even themselves out after a great outing against the New Jersey Lemaires and a big poo poo in San Theodore last night.

It was a frustrating game and I could have avoided the whole thing had I just listened to signs from God that found their way into my karma early on – like this one that appeared on my screen about ten minutes into the first period: Attention: Your DVR will automatically enter power-save mode in 5 minutes. Please press any remote key to continue watching TV. This of course always gets me scrambling in a mad frenzy for a lost remote that is mischievously squeezed between two couch pillows, as I anxiously wage war against a panicky countdown that begins in my head.

Mistake number one of the night was finding the zapper. I now wish I had somehow managed to mistakenly stick the remote in the fridge. I would have looked for hours, missed the game and watched Carey Clause in the highlights.

Price found a way to make Brian Campbell look like Bobby Orr and Jonathan Cheechoo like,… Jonathan Cheechoo. Pencil in the Shelley Long special he offered up on a goal from the East coast and the kid would only have needed to air-drop a few bags of rice over scattered villages in Nicaragua to win the Humanitarian of the Night Award.

TFS lost the two points, although it doesn’t help when the team gives up two quick ones when the game is barely 3 minutes old. I guess San Jose likes to skip the foreplay.

At least Montreal showed some character with their signature never say die composure. They came back to tie the game 3 times and could have made it 5 all had they pressed some more. But give credit to the Sharks; they shut Montreal down at the halfway mark of the third period and wouldn’t yield despite giving the Habs a couple of power plays and some daylight to bolster hopes of another tie. On this night, the best penalty kill in the NHL totally maimed its best power play.

Weird game, showered with odd-bounces, a bizarre cadence throughout, and some of the worst officiating of the season. The refs must have thought you only award four minute power plays to Vulcans because the red blood on the bridge of Grabovski’s nose didn't seem to impress them. Not enough to earn the right call. Then a too many Sharks, with the ice looking like the Great Barrier Reef, and yet, somehow, no call. And the one that makes me want to catapult off an Olympic diving board head first into a pile of cement, features Andrei Markov – who may not have amassed twenty words in English during his five year tenure in Montreal - called for an unsportsmanlike by the refs who must have taken offence to one of those twenty words. Unless the officials took a minor in Russian lit, this goes down as THE paradoxical call of the year. These are officials who would call travelling in a basketball game at the Special Olympics.

Yeah, just a weird vibe throughout the whole thing, with no team ever managing to set a tone or keep a lead long enough to assume any semblance of control. Broken plays followed one another in sequential disorder. A puck that gave credence to the HP sign over the front door, by morphing into a Hot Potato for three full periods.

I really hated this one, du début à la fin. It provided enough suspense to keep you interested while merely offering an unsettling Crying Game cringe on revelation of the end result. Did I really have to navigate through the broken plot for this bitter end? A game that steered itself to conclusion like the end of a John Grisham novel. Shoulda known better.

Shoulda left the remote in the fridge.

P.S: The title? An SNL sketch featuring Jim Belushi as a chess coach with a Bobby Knight temper. Best line: “Some people say I lost control that day. But when you’re down two pawns, you gotta do something.”Gold.