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Ontario champs! Now Leafs have to come south of the border
Posted: Monday May 01, 2000 08:01 PM
By Chris Stevenson, SLAM! Sports OTTAWA -- Steve Thomas. Forget Tom Barrasso's four-letter faux pas on national television. When Ottawa Senators fans say they have two words for you, well, you know what they will be. For the second-straight night, Thomas, the Toronto Maple Leafs veteran winger, took a team that was as good as dead and just like that, almost out of nowhere, dragged them kicking back to life. At the same time, he killed the Senators. Thomas' first goal Monday night, his sixth of the series, spurred the Leafs to a come-from-behind 4-2 win at the Corel Centre and eliminated the Senators four games to two in their Eastern Conference quarterfinal. "He was probably the key to the series," said Senators defenceman Jason York. "He turned it round for them. He stole (Game 5) for them in Toronto Saturday night and he got the goal again tonight. He's an opportunist. You've got to give him credit." The Leafs will now try to do the same thing to the New Jersey Devils in one of the Eastern semifinals. Game 1 is Thursday and Game 2 Saturday at the Air Canada Centre. The Pittsburgh Penguins and Philadelphia Flyers meet in the other semifinal which gets underway Thursday in Philly. Thomas will get a chance to do to the Devils, where he played for three seasons before joining the Leafs, what he did to the Senators.
Three minutes after his goal Monday night, there was Thomas again, bursting down the right wing and terrorizing another Ottawa defenceman with his 36-year-old legs. His shot off the leg of Igor Kravchuk deflected to Leafs captain Mats Sundin and he buried the puck in the open side to the right of Barrasso. "When (Thomas) scored, the bench just seemed to erupt," said Toronto winger Darcy Tucker. Though the game was only tied at that point, the feeling in the building was the outcome had been decided. The Senators could play their defensive style all they wanted, but it was never going to be a match for the Leafs' quick-strike abilities personified in Thomas. "I like it when I'm counted on," said Thomas. "I like to be accountable to myself and I want to be accountable to all the guys in the room. There are going to be nights when you're not the guy. I get a real blast out of being the guy." In the broadest of terms, this series was structure against creativity. Structure didn't stand a chance. The free-wheeling Leafs made a shambles of the Senators defensive system, forcing the Senators into a rare panic and jumping on the ensuing mistakes. For the second-straight game, the Senators scored first but this time got the second goal they couldn't find in Game 5. But not even that was enough to stop the unflagging Leafs forwards. Ottawa's Joe Juneau gave the Senators a 1-0 lead less than four minutes into the game. In an eerie replay of their demise in Game 5 48 hours earlier, the Senators squandered a 5-on-3 man advantage when Toronto forwards Gary Valk -- as he had in Game 5 -- was sent off for highsticking. The Senators again failed to score. But while the Senators failure to score in that situation in Game 5 gave the Leafs a boost, this time the Senators bounced back to make it 2-0 when defenceman Igor Kravchuk rifled a shot off the post at 3:59 of the second period. That's when Thomas, the Senator killer, put his team back in the game. Salo tried to pass the puck on his backhand up the middle of the ice. It didn't look like he got all of it and the puck went right onto Thomas' stick in the right wing faceoff circle. He took a step and then rifled it by Barrasso on the stick side. "That was a real bad play by me," said Salo, his face streaked with tears after the game. "He scored and it turned the game the other way around." After Sundin's goal, it seemed just a matter of time before the whiff of panic which had begun to swirl about the Senators would grow to engulf them. The Senators couldn't clear the front of the net after killing a slashing penalty to Barrasso halfway through the period and Sergei Berezin jumped on a loose puck and slipped it under Barrasso's left arm to make it 3-2 at 10:40. More shoddy play in their own zone, which saw Salo clear the puck blindly up the board and onto the stick of Leafs defenceman Cory Cross resulted in Wendel Clark's first goal of the playoffs a 18:47. This might be all you need to know about this series: Clark, who didn't even dress for the first four games, wound up outscoring the Senators line of Radek Bonk, Magnus Arvedson and Marian Hossa, Ottawa's top offensive unit during the regular season. The trio are still looking for the first playoff goals of their careers. They're going to have to wait a while now. 
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