Chaos In The Crease

Tomas Holmstrom positioned himself in front of the Anaheim net last Friday on a third-period Detroit Red Wings power play. NHL coaches like to call this an example of "traffic," but when the double-parked player is Holmstrom, he creates something more insidious than mere gridlock. He plants his skates millimeters outside the blue-tinted 44-square-foot area that delineates the crease and refuses to budge, raising hockey hell, obstructing the goaltender's view, tying up defensemen, tipping pucks and generally being a miserable cuss.

On a team with elegant Swedes such as Holmstrom's linemate Henrik Zetterberg and defenseman Nicklas Lidstrom, Holmstrom is a Norse of a different color. "He can't skate," general manager Ken Holland says. "If you have him race most NHL players over 30 feet, he'd lose. But put a puck four feet away, tell him to get there first, and Homer"-- Holmstrom's nickname--"will win that race. And when he sets up shop at the front of the net, they can't twist him or turn him."

Not that Ducks goaltender Jean-S�bastien Gigu�re and defensemen Scott Niedermayer and Fran�ois Beauchemin weren't trying in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals. Holmstrom jostled with all three as Lidstrom wound up for a slap shot from the point. A goalie, much like a hitter in baseball who picks up a pitch at its release point, can usually tell where a puck is headed if he can read the shot off the stick. Although Holmstrom is only 5'11", 202 pounds, he has a way of filling a goaltender's field of vision. Sometimes Holmstrom will take an arm off his stick and wave it, or he'll raise his stick and rotate it like the coupling rod on a locomotive's wheel. This time, as Lidstrom shot, Holmstrom pivoted and flapped his arms like a wind-blown scarecrow. The puck was lost in the thicket of Holmstrom and the three Ducks ("Three versus one, Homer loves those odds," said Detroit center Kris Draper) before somehow reappearing in the net. The workingman's goal with five minutes left, initially credited to Lidstrom but later awarded to Holmstrom (the puck appeared to glance off his upper body), gave the Red Wings a 2--1 victory. Holland called it "classic Homer," a fitting observation given the puck's odyssey.

These, of course, are the kinds of goals that win Stanley Cups. Deflections. Rebounds. Screens. Goals so ugly only a tough mother like Holmstrom could love them. Teams that control the front of the net control the conference finals, and the irony of the more "open" postlockout NHL is that the game has essentially been shrunk to a mere 30 feet, 15 in front of each crease. With referees making obstruction calls more frequently, and defenses often being forced to collapse deep into their own zone to guard against long, now legal two-line passes, the path to the front of the net is simpler and swifter. This comes in an era when goalies are larger and more adroit than ever, far less likely than their progenitors to let in a wicked shot from the wing. As Wings coach Mike Babcock puts it, "If you don't get on the inside every trip down the ice, they're the ones running the rink."

Lay the 24 goals the Ducks, Wings, Sabres and Senators scored in the four conference finals games through Sunday end to end, and--if you toss out Joe Corvo's long-range bouncer that gave Ottawa a double-overtime win in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals--they wouldn't even surpass a baseball slugger's tape-measure home run. In the opener of the Ottawa-Buffalo series, after Senators fourth-liner Oleg Saprykin used a Sabres defenseman as a screen and scored from inside 15 feet, he said he was thinking, "Just go to the net hard. That's the way to get on the score sheet. That's where goals are going to be." Saprykin's goal proved to be the winner in Ottawa's 5--2 victory.

"You're not going to get open looks [as a forward], so you've got to cause havoc and confusion," said Buffalo goalie Ryan Miller. "Their fourth goal [in Game 1] was a great example. The shooter [ defenseman Wade Redden] didn't know where [the puck] was [after he shot it]. I didn't know where it was. The only guy who knew where it was was the guy coming off the play [in front of the net, Jason] Spezza," the center who nudged it home from just outside the blue paint.

The dangerous, crowded space bordering the crease remains the province of forwards who have some stick skills, good hockey sense and a lot of courage--determined men such as Holmstrom, who returned from an eye injury in Game 4 of the second round to kick-start a winning streak of four playoff games before Detroit lost 4--3 to the Ducks on Sunday night to tie the conference finals after two games. Holmstrom's mastery is especially pronounced on the power play, which is a robust 8 for 26 since Game 4 of the second-round San Jose series. In that game he used a Bjorn Borg ground stroke on a rebound to produce a point-blank goal in the waning seconds of the second period, keying an unlikely comeback. Dustin Penner, the hulking Ducks leftwinger charged with executing similar front-of-the-net responsibilities, was impressed. "The first game back, and what he did with one eye or one-and-a-half eyes, it's a credit to him," Penner said.

Penner has faced his own challenges this year. Because he hasn't always commanded the front of the net with sufficient presence, coach Randy Carlyle has made the 29-goal sophomore his whipping boy. "It takes more focus and concentration than you think," says Penner, who practices tipping pucks daily. "All the goals that net-front guys score are a matter of a split second or less. That's all the time you get to capitalize on a loose puck before a [defenseman] or goalie tosses it away or covers it. Some guys have a higher learning curve or start off higher on the tipping scale. Some guys just have the timing. Some guys have the ability to get better at it. I hope I'm one of those."

He might take heart from the fact that Holmstrom routinely ran afoul of his coach early in his NHL career. The 257th pick of the 1994 draft arrived in Detroit from Sweden with the nickname Demolition Man because of how he pinballed his way to the crease with his choppy stride, crashing and bumping, playing a very non-Swedish brand of hockey. Scotty Bowman, the Red Wings coach, would point to the crease and order Holmstrom to stay there. "I'd say, 'But when the puck goes into the corner...,' and he'd say, 'No, I don't want you to leave,'" Holmstrom recalls. "It was a little too much."

Although he sets up with his back to the net, facing the puck, the GPS in Holmstrom's brain knows precisely where the crease is so that he doesn't impede illegally--he has no goalie-interference penalties in this year's playoffs. He also has a feel for the geometry of the shot, the only net-front player in the NHL who continually alters his angle, trying to mirror what he anticipates is the goalie's movement. Says Red Wings backup goalie Chris Osgood, who played against Holmstrom when Osgood was with St. Louis, "Some guys are happy to stay in one place.... You can kinda look around them. But Homer comes into your sight line late, just as the puck's shot."