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You've got to be-Leaf! Thomas carries Toronto to OT win in Game 5
Posted: Monday May 01, 2000 07:27 PM By Chris Stevenson, SLAM Sports! TORONTO -- Who knew? Who knew Toronto Maple Leafs winger Sergei Berezin could pass the puck like that? The surprise was not that Steve Thomas scored with less than five minutes to go in the first overtime period to give the Leafs a 2-1 win and a 3-2 stranglehold on their Eastern Conference quarterfinal against the Ottawa Senators. Thomas has been known to do that. No, the surprise was Berezin, who would shoot from a telephone booth on Bay Street if he had the room to wind up, nailed a perfect feed to Thomas, who had only to redirect the puck under Senators goaltender Tom Barrasso to end a thriller the Senators let get away. "If you have somebody to pass it to, you pass it," said Berezin, who had carried the puck over the Senators' blue line in a furious span of to-and-fro between the two clubs in OT. "I didn't have any room to shoot. It was a 2-on-1 and I saw Stumpy (Thomas) open going to the net. "He's the guy to pass it to. He always scores in OT." Thomas' goal, his second of the night, gave the Leafs the chance to win the series in Game 6 back in Ottawa Monday night. Game 7, if necessary, will be played here Tuesday night. "It was a huge game," said Thomas. "It was a huge goal because it gives our team a chance to win the series. That's the most important thing. Now we've just got to finish it off." The Senators deserved to win this one if you go by the edge in play, but that hasn't counted for much lately.
They can take a little consolation in the fact they played their best and most complete game of the series. That has been the hard truth in this series so far, the team that has played the best hasn't won more than half the time.
It was just the Leafs second shot of the third period as the Senators had done a masterful job of checking the Leafs to a standstill.
"There was a point in the third period when we couldn't even dump it in," said Thomas. "That's how well they were playing. They were like a wall."
Sundin's line had been a big factor in the Leafs' wins in Games 1 and 2 here, but had been neutralized in Ottawa as Senators coach Jacques Martin used the checking unit centred by Radek Bonk against them in Games 3 and 4.
Martin did a good job of getting the defensive duo of Igor Kravchuk and Sami Salo on the ice more often than not against Sundin's unit Saturday night, but it didn't help them on Thomas' goals.
Sundin drove in on Salo and left the puck for Thomas who blasted it from just inside the top of the left wing circle.
The Senators actually started to lose control of the game at a time when they could have put it away. Ottawa led 1-0 in the third and the Leafs had had but one shot on net eight minutes into the third, looking quite dead in the water. The crowd was on their backs.
Then Toronto's Tie Domi was sent off for interference at 8:08 of the third. With 38 seconds left in his minor, Toronto's Gary Valk got a double minor for highsticking Bonk.
Instead of putting the game away with a goal, the Senators power play failed to generate much in the way of sustained pressure, never mind chances and the Leafs seemed to feed off the successful kill.
"For me, that was the turning point of the game," said Leafs goaltender Curtis Joseph. "If they get a goal there, it would have been over."
The Senators scored the only goal of the first two periods, at 4:30 of the second, and it was the way these two teams play in miniature, the Leafs gambling and the Senators counterattacking.
Senators winger Andreas Dackell drove hard down the left wing and pulled up inside the Toronto blue line. His delay allowed Shawn McEachern and Joe Juneau to drive to the net and Dackell fed the puck across the slot. McEachern, saw the puck go by him and Juneau wired a one-timer back against the grain that caught Joseph moving to his left.
The Senators played a textbook game after that, but handed the momentum to the Leafs with that botched power-play opportunity.
The Senators played a solid game for about 50 minutes Saturday night, but that wasn't enough.
Now they have no choice.
They must play 120 minutes -- maybe more if there's more overtime -- or their season will be over.
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