Pass It To Bulis: Surly Sedins the key to victory,
Harrison Mooney says: Cranky old guys will spur team to victory
Asked whether he planned to make an emotional pre-game speech in advance of a must-win Game 5, Henrik Sedin provided only snark. “You want me to cry?” he quipped, shutting down that line of questioning on sight.
Henrik was feeling particularly cranky before Game 5, which is fair. He’s old, and it was the mid-afternoon, which is nap time. Asked what needed to happen offensively for the Canucks, he responded, “We’re trying to shoot the puck past Hiller, their goalie.” Asked to elaborate, the captain doubled down: “You just try to shoot the puck past him over the goal-line.” He was in some kind of mood.
Of course, Henrik wasn’t just being a jerk for no reason. (He and his brother aren’t the sort, and if you need proof, consider the video making the rounds in which Deryk Engelland loses his stick shoving Daniel Sedin after a whistle, and Daniel helpfully picks it up for him while Engelland looks on, confused.) He was deflecting, because he didn’t want to give anything away.
The Canucks had made some offensive adjustments, like committing to getting in Jonas Hiller’s grill by bringing the puck hard to the net and jamming away like Beck on tour until the whistle went. And Henrik Sedin did intend to make a pre-game speech, but he wasn’t about to share it with the media, lest they get too motivated and start asking him harder questions to deflect.
No doubt the speech was just too dangerous to let it get out. A more powerful motivator than need, or lust, or anger. The Promethean fire of Swedish twin gods.
But we did get some sense of what it entailed, and its effect. Nick Bonino, who made his first genuine impact in the series by scoring the all-important game-tying goal, was still talking about it after the game: “Henrik gave a pretty good talk this morning about how they had been down 3-1 in series past and they’d won those and they’d been up 3-1 and lost, too,” Bonino said. “I think it kind of calmed guys’ nerves a little bit. Anything can happen.”
In the lead-up to Game 5, all we talked about was 1994, when the Canucks staged the comeback and beat the Flames in seven games, and I guess it’s not too surprising that we went there. All we ever talk about is 1994. All we think about, too. According to studies, men think about sex every seven seconds. For Vancouverites, five of the remaining six seconds are taken up by dreams of ’94.
Henrik Sedin’s got another year in mind, however: 2003, when the Canucks came back to win a first-round series with the St. Louis Blues after falling behind three games to one, and then watched the Minnesota Wild do the exact same thing to them in Round 2.
That’s right. Looking to say something that would send his teammates onto the ice believing in themselves and sufficiently pumped, Henrik Sedin dusted off the old yarn about that time they lost.
But it makes sense. You can tell your teammates that the 3- 1 hole isn’t insurmountable, that the statistics, which paint it as an unlikelihood, shouldn’t matter here. But experience is going to go a lot further. And if you’ve been on both sides of the coin in the same year — like, you actually saw two 3-1 leads disintegrate two weeks apart — it can’t really be all that unlikely, can it?
This is where Henrik and Daniel’s experience comes in handy.
Forget 18- year- old Sam Bennett (whose youth fascinates the men behind the CBC broadcast, perhaps because it’s been so long since any of them were young). What story is this kid gonna inspire you with? The time he found a Dark Magician card in his YuGi-Oh starter pack? Give me 34-year-old Henrik and Daniel Sedin, covered in frown lines from years of playing in big games and losing more than they win, any day.
Sure, they occasionally look like old men out there. But sometimes you need old men. Who else will buy those plaid polyester pants? How else will you know the price of stamps, and whether it’s fair? And who has a story for every single situation, including but not limited to when you need to convince your team the thing they’re trying to do is super easy and super common? Old people. Old people for the win, in Games 5, 6, and 7.