Page 114 of For the Boys
Hockey seasons were long, and any team had the opportunity to get hot at any given time. Putting together a win streak could move a last-place team to the top of the league in a few short weeks. All points were important and difficult to come by. Getting into the playoffs was a reward in itself, but it was merely a stepping stone to the bigger prize: the Stanley Cup.
Some teams were consistently good though. Luckily, the Warriors were one of them.
So were the Toronto Tritons.
Currently sitting in first place in the Eastern Conference standings, the Tritons were four points ahead of the second-place Warriors.
The road to the Cup would surely go through Toronto, which made tonight’s game all the more important.
The Tritons had finished near the bottom of the league last season, but a top-three draft pick and excellent off-season signings had catapulted them to the top almost overnight. They were a young and fast team, boasting a veteran netminder who stood between the pipes like a brick wall.
Abandoning his usual modus operandi of leaving Brent and his linemates to stew on the bench to start the game, Coach sent his line out to center ice for the puck drop.
Brent watched as Chase took the face-off and tapped the puck behind him to Parker, and they were off.
Brent raced through the neutral zone, pausing at the entrance to their offensive zone, letting Cole nudge the puck in over the line before him. Brent followed it into the corner, sending it around behind the net to Chase’s waiting stick. Chase quickly sent it up to Mitch, who slid it across to Parker. Parker wound up and let a slapshot fly. It bounced off the skate of a Tritons player, finding its way onto Brent’s stick. Brent, unprepared for the redirect, flubbed the shot, and the Tritons goalie stopped it easily, covering it on the ice with his glove.
The whole thing had taken about thirty seconds, so Coach left Brent’s line on the ice, Chase skating into the circle to take the face-off.
Chase lost, the Tritons player opposite him beating him to the dropping puck and pushing it back to his teammate, who turned and moved toward center ice.
“Rat!” Brent heard Coach call, and Brent quickly skated to the bench, climbing over the wall on the fly for a line change. Chase also made it off, but Cole, Parker, and Mitch got caught on the ice until the next opportunity to change, which came another thirty seconds later.
Back and forth the two teams went, neither able to gain momentum or generate much in the way of scoring opportunities. It was a fitful game, full of stops and starts. The refs were trigger-happy with their whistles, content to call a penalty on either team if someone so much as breathed wrong. It had been a frustrating forty minutes, made more so by the fact that the score was tied at zero.
“I fucking hate playing in Canada,” Coach said when the team was seated in the locker room during the second intermission.
“That makes two of us,” Jordan said. As captain, he was responsible for advocating for the team with the refs, and it had not been going well. “What is even happening out there? I feel like we’re all flopping around like fish out of water, and that includes the Tritons.”
“The officiating is terrible,” Grey said.
“We’re professionals, not peewees,” Rat added. “Why can’t they just let us play?”
“I wish I knew,” Coach said. “But we can’t change it. I know it’s hard to go out there and play our game when they won’t let game play go on for longer than a few minutes without a whistle, so we have to get creative.”
“Creative how?” Brent asked, afraid of where this was going.
“Four forwards.” The entire locker room groaned.
Four forwards was a favorite power-play tactic of Coach’s. He was of the mind that one more forward on the ice increased their chance of scoring by twenty percent.
Clearly, his players did not agree.
“So we’re going to play the entire third with only one defenseman on the ice during every shift?” Jordan asked.
“Yep,” Coach said, proud of himself.
Another groan sounded throughout the room. The clock on the wall showed ten minutes left until the third period started.
“So what’s the plan?” Chase asked.
“Plan?” Coach replied, surprised.
Jordan sighed, and Parker snickered. “Coach, you can’t expect us to go out there and operate like that without a plan.”
“I was expecting you to treat it like a power play.”
“Except it won’t be like a power play,” Brent said. “They’ll have five guys on the ice, and two of them will be defensemen, unlike us.”
