HCP 4/7

OLL 5 - 4 HCP (OT)

BOYCHUK AND SIMŠIČ SAVE THE DAY

DRAGONS DEFY ERRORS TO RESURRECT THEIR CHANCES

We're not dead yet!

https://tenor.com/en-GB/view/undertaker-coffin-just-woke-up-wwe-gif-5289384

https://giphy.com/gifs/jm4nsAWdCV4Lm

https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/171305372/Soldier-protecting-sleeping-child

Sodja returns, McNeill on crutches 

https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/168871916/Marie-Kondo-Spark-Joy Plus OLL site and Insta. 

Kapel under Karhula:

https://tenor.com/en-GB/view/chevy-chase-vegas-vacation-cocktail-gif-25195805

Kapel under CC:

https://tenor.com/en-GB/view/goggins-david-goggins-work-get-back-to-work-back-to-work-gif-27698662

Goals (I had to bring this section back because we finally scored!)

P1

HCP - Oh-oh. Ćosić backhands the puck right into an oncoming HCP attacker's path as he is retreating from the NZ into our DZ. The ensuing 1-on-0 rush goes in. Hey, at least we only conceded in the first 10 minutes of the game, instead of the first 5, as in the previous games! Perhaps this is the Ćosić CC has seen in practise that has caused 14's limited playing time this year. Still, young D will make mistakes - let's see how he responds. 

OLL - Kapel from Pance and Ćosić. Ćosić helps to redeem his previous error by finding Pance, but it's the latter who does most of the work here, with a beautiful delayed pass around the defender's stick. Kapel is there at the back post to gratefully receive it. A just reward for Kapel's hard work this season and transformation under CC into such a dogged, reliable player. Let's not forget, last season he drifted back without a care in the world on the backcheck; now, he wouldn't dream of doing that. Finally, a goal that wasn't reviewed! Finally, we get to hear a PRRRRRVVIIIII trill from Pečo.

HCP - An annoying fan with a whistle behind me made me initially think this goal had been blown dead. before going in. Sadly, it was a delayed penalty off another rush chance that was then put in from a very wide angle by HCP. 

P2

OLL - Sabla from Mehle and Gregorc. A signature slapshot blast from Sabla, with good traffic in front of the net to help disrupt Pasquale. 

OLL PPG - Brennan from Mahkovec and Meyer. Mahkovec hit the post but thankfully TJ scores a 'poacher's goal' as we say in Britain, jamming it in from the net-front chaos zone. 

P3

HCP - Tokarski makes a tremendous pad save off yet another rush chance for HCP, but they put the rebound in after Kirichenko fell over on a 2 on 2. Kiri has not looked up to game-speed this series after his injury layoff - perhaps they should have had him as 7th D until he was less rusty, as HCP have been violating him all series. 

HCP - With 1:44 to go, HCP take the lead and deflate the stadium. Is it another rush chance? You bet it is! Did Tokarski save the initial chance? Yes sir! Did he get knocked over by his own defender, making the rebound easy to put away? Yepppp!

OLL - But it's not over yet! 40s later, Boychuk responds! Hey, we responded instead of reacting, like George Mumford and I suggested! Drozg and Meyer find Boychuk in a low-slot position for an impressively smooth one-time swish through Pasquale's five-hole (between his legs). We're level at 4-4! I was getting ready for a depressing walk home, but we're still in it! More empty-net heroics against an Italian team in the playoffs!

OT 

OLL - With 59.6s remaining in the highly tense first OT period (and with OHB preparing to dash to the toilet as the period break struck), Simšič spins to win! Mehle took Pasquale's eyes away and 12 concealed his quick turn-shot to sink it past Pasquale's right pad. The young guy next to me was almost crying into my shoulder as we celebrated. A pretty beautiful sporting moment for everyone watching! This is life, isn't it? From the depths of misery to the heights of elation, you can't have one without the other. Pandora's box gave us all the bad stuff but hope as well - let's carry her hope into the rest of this series, now we can believe in ourselves to score on Pasquale. Meyer and Ćosić on the assist. 

Takeaways

• As NR and I agreed, HCP still looked really good tonight, even in defeat. They kept absorbing pressure just to hit us with lightning-fast counter-transitions, resulting in plentiful rushes. These were the basis for their 4 goals and we must not give them so many of these going forward. To use a tennis term, we made far too many unforced errors and those must be minimised if we want to continue to climb back into this series. 
• ED called it: he said since Sodja was back, we'd 100% win. We did! I do have to say, it was a delight to see Sodja back prowling on the PK. It's not been the same without him. It's a testament to Sodja and Beričič's abilities that they are absolute prime time viewing on the PK, hunting down attackers and making heroic blocks.
• Even if we lose tonight, we can go out with our heads held high. We finally showed the real Olimpija in this series - self-inflicted conceding, but greater self-directed scoring.
• Boychuk has had such a tantalising season. He hasn't been the panacea at 1C that we all hoped he'd be, but he has undeniably had a knack for scoring enormously important goals. Tonight was another feather in his cap.
• Fair play to Simšič - I had dissed him a bit pre-game by saying of all the players, he wasn't a great choice to tell the fans to be sensible at the game, given his frequent silly penalties in big moments. Yet, as I said to ED and LR post-game, perhaps this was karma coming back around and giving him a positive moment for a change. As ED said, though, there's probably a lot more positive karma needed to fully balance it out 😆
• I'm glad we scored a PPG because we really needed one. Our first tonight was back to the dark days of Karhula, where the short-handed team would get better chances than we did. They did indeed hit the post, whilst we barely got a shot off. Mercifully, we changed our ways back to the CC normality.
• Our passes were not crispy tonight, but we generated way more chances than in previous games. That proved the difference. HCP were fantastic at the aforementioned absorption of pressure and conversion of that into rush offense, but they were not as strong at creating offense ex nihilo. We were better in that regard and thus we deserved the win. We were certainly more active than HCP in OT, even if they had their chances, too. 
• Despite conceding 4 goals, Tokarski did truly help us paper over some of the cracks in our play and was a key part of this victory, especially in OT. 
• Ultimately, we overcame the unforced errors to tilt momentum in our favour at the very end and in OT. As French-Canadian eSports star xQc used to say, "WE GO AGANE" tonight. 

 

HCP 2-3/7

2/7: HCP 3 - 0 OLL

• The main pivot point of this game was as follows: TJ scored a goal, which was overturned for goalie interference. This was the softest of calls, especially considering what the NHL lets go now (significant contact, not Mehle going 1cm into the crease and lightly brushing the goalie). This goal being disallowed changed the entire game, sending it down a dark path of player and fan violence/rowdiness. The fact that it was a Smash Burger goal only catalysed everything.

 What do these three have in common?

https://www.dmagazine.com/sports/2024/07/jamie-benn-dallas-stars-birthday/ plus OLL photos on website,

• Two violent moments stand out in particular: 
• Sabla turning into Muhammad Sabli again, against a player unwilling to fight. He just did so anyway and received a major penalty and a trip to the locker room for the rest of the game. This was very Jamie Benn of the Dallas Stars behaviour - another captain who put his team in a bad position with unprovoked violence. 
• Yet, Benn's vicious slash on Mark Stone's neck was more like what Alex Petan did to HCP's Bowlby, with a frankly horrendous attempt to seriously injure the defenceless forward. If anyone follows UFC/Boxing, you know hits to the back of the head are deadly serious. A 2 game ban followed; he was lucky it wasn't more. 
• Sabla's fight was fun but losing him for the rest of a key playoff game wasn't fun. Petan's 5+2 minutes was the first 7 min penalty I've seen at Tivoli and was fair enough, as he completely lost his head and tried to take someone else's off. I can see why HCP fans were so furious on social media after the game; we would be, too, if that kind of thing was happening to our players. 

OHB trying not to mention how players should be role models:

https://tenor.com/en-GB/view/fart-gif-1464110557799179961

• Now, for the crowd stuff: people throwing stuff onto the ice, it's not about you. Sing and shout and gesticulate all you want, but don't delay the game over and over and over. I ended up leaving with 57s to go because it was a school night and the fights / launching of objects onto the ice seemed interminable. It's the first time I've ever left an OLL game early, which should tell you how bad it was.
• Security, a familiar bete noir for OHB, fed into this, too. As usual, their performance was almost comically bad. I can't believe I have to sit through hours of in-person fire safety presentations at school from Slovene organisations, yet the biggest game of the year in HT sees a complete lack of safety with aisles packed full of people without seats. How was this not cleared out / why were they not funnelled elsewhere? One or two people standing is fine, as in previous playoff games against HCB. Having an arena that is extremely difficult to get out from is pretty much how ever sporting horror story starts! Unfortunately, I know very well how little the security in HT actually care about fan safety. To quote the title of a wonderful debut book by Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, the security team's care is "Less than Zero" (I would love to write about how the fans in the aisles are people afraid to merge in traffic, but I fear I would be the only one who enjoyed that reference to the book's opening page). 
• Were there any redeeming features to this game? Well, I thought Bukovec was very active and impressive on the forecheck, busting a gut to help set up his teammates. He also put himself in good positions to score. Drozg was also clearly trying his best, but nothing was going in for him. 

3/7: OLL 0 - 3 HCP

• In the most important game of the year thus far, we concede within 8 seconds, on the first action of the game. Kirichenko and Tokarski are asleep at the wheel and HCP walk in and score with breezy ease. Start as you mean to go on, eh, boys? :)
• You could fairly question the wisdom of starting Kirichenko here, who was out injured recently. However, Tokarski looked pretty lethargic on this sequence, too, so maybe it's just the whole squad being over-tired and not used to playing this late in the season? That's an area where HCP have more practise than us, certainly. Hopefully this series won't take the shine off our success in hitting our goal this season of auto-playoffs and going one further with a series win. 
• They scored another in the first 5 mins of the game, an easy one off the rush. 
• Gregorc did respond with an impressive goal from a wide angle, but of course it was reviewed. Of course, it was Simšič offside. No happiness allowed.
• We just couldn't execute anything on offense. I said to ED that our performance in the OZ tonight was like me talking to a girl I liked when I was at university: a complete fumble every single time 😆
• With 10 mins to go in P3, 0-2 down, we were in a 5 on 3. The usual Olimpija kind of scenarios. 
• They scored a well-worked goal as we were trying to get a 6-on-5 empty net going. Our defensive coverage was basically just standing and puck-watching, allowing HCP to find a soft spot within the three players closest to goal.

OVERALL TAKEAWAYS

My general reaction to the series so far:

https://tenor.com/en-GB/view/laughing-with-eyes-open-gif-27258100

https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/Pepperidge-Farm-Remembers

https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/Member-Berries

When you realise Pasquale shutting us out 3 times in a row isn't a nightmare, it's reality:

https://tenor.com/en-GB/view/spam-gif-3643884685273536140

• Here's a cool fact amidst the general misery: NU told me that Tokarski and Pasquale have previous; they fought each other in an AHL game. If we lose 3-0 again tonight in game 4, at least let's have a goalie fight to cheer us up. 
• CC and Olimpija are like some plucky Illyrians with their farming equipment trying to take on HCP's Roman general and his army of professional soldiers right now. I honestly look at their coach and can see a big-schnozzed, granite-faced Roman general about to commit a minor genocide on my tribe. He's doing a great job so far! 🙈
• Regarding Pustertal's diving for penalties - may I once more refer you to the Euro 2020 England-Italy final, where constant Italian gamesmanship brought down England, alongside their own melting under pressure. From the very foundation of Rome, rule-breaking was justified as long as you won. Romulus killing Remus, deliberately breaking Hellenistic gentlemanly rules of war against Hannibal and others, civil wars galore where the winner took it all... We shouldn't be surprised that they're simulating to get penalties is what I'm getting at, before I launch back into the past.
• What we also shouldn't do is to lose our cool and give them monster-sized power plays. Even though they largely frittered these away, there was no way we could realistically expect to properly compete when handing out those with regularity. 
• I like fights, don't get me wrong, but they are just kind of sad when we are getting beaten so comprehensively. You might say that with the two disallowed goals counting, we would have been more competitive. NR did say that 3/7 was more watchable. We have to hope we're trending in the right direction. 
• These games are a good lesson that sometimes in life, the worst scenario does actually happen. HCP are beating us in such a generational way, with Pasquale shattering the playoff record for time without conceding (albeit helped by disallowed goals). I feel like we should be getting ready to hand over our women and children to them, like rainforest tribes do when they lose this hard. 
• George Mumford, the mentality coach behind basketball's greatest stars, has a good quote for times like this: "Respond from the centre of the hurricane, rather than reacting from the chaos of the storm". All series we have been reacting, not responding. We must start by choosing effective responses tonight instead of getting cut down reacting to fleeting shadows of ephemeral wolves. Let's go from Sam Darnold's 'seeing ghosts' with the Jets to his assured control taking the Seahawks to victory this year. 
• Talking of other sports, in the NFL they say "Defence wins championships". The best illustration of this is the Seahawks' first Super Bowl win in 2013, when they came up against the record-breaking Denver Broncos offense under Peyton Manning. The Broncos were widely picked to crush Seattle, but it went the other way - Seattle destroyed them 43-8. Perhaps we need to adjust CC's system, as it feels like we are the former-offensive-hotshot Broncos right now getting demolished by HCP's crushing defensive mastery. 
• EDIT: I forgot to say, I sat in my actual season ticket seat for the first time ever, due to how busy it was. An older guy with a uni-age son turned round and looked at me a couple of times, but that's nothing unusual in Slavic lands. People like to stare. The older guy then came up to me with his phone and showed me a picture of myself with CC and said something along the lines of 'is this you?'. I said yes and was ready to have at least a brief, friendly chat - but he simply walked off 😅 Is this what being the most minor of celebrities feels like? Why are people weird like that? Have a chat with me, come on! 😂

Some choice quotes from friends of the blog:

• ED: I don't believe in God or destiny, but this series might change that.
• ED: When our stars don't shine, they quickly get an attitude problem.
• ED: Winning a series after not scoring a single goal in the first 3 games would probably be the biggest story in playoff history, as winning a series without a goal against would be.
• NR (mid-game): This is so Joever.

https://tenor.com/en-GB/view/its-joever-gif-1522251353317462624

• NR (post-game): Game 3 was much more watchable than the last two. No unnecessary fouls (Brennan in P3 was a bollocks call), actually some offense, crappy PP, good PK, Tokarski was okay etc. If it wasn't for the first two early goals, this would have been a pretty open game. If we progress like that on Sunday, we might win or at least bring it close (score a goal). 

How every game is going for us this series: 

With thanks to ThatsGoodSports on YT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WV4imSV85I