Observations From The Morning Skate -- The Cliche Edition (with numbers)

Excuse the lateness of this posting, but I was busy with some breaking news for the mothership. That said, I’ll just combine the observations from the morning skate with inside the numbers for just one post.

So…

You’ve already seen the big news from the Morning Skate about Anton Khudobin getting the start tonight at goal for Houston. Kevin Constantine said it was nothing that Nolan Schaefer did wrong, but more that Khudobin is the guy who has gotten the wins for the team in the playoffs.

“We’re going back to Anton. He’ll start tonight,” Constantine said. “We really, with Anton in the playoffs, didn’t have a lot of choices because the other goalies were hurt. Then you get back to where Nolan and Barry are healthy and you start to have choices and the decisions get harder. We’d gone into our last game having won only one of our last five, so we thought we would try something so we tried Nolan. He didn’t play a bad game. He didn’t make some big saves in some situations where we needed big saves, but at the same time we gave up really, really high quality chances that you wouldn’t look at those as goalie mistakes but as we gave up too big a chances. We don’t think he played bad. At the same time, Anton seems to be the guy who’s gotten wins in the playoffs for us, so we’re going back to him.”

As for this being the ultimate do-or-die game for the Aeros, Tony Hrkac, while apologizing, went with the clichés. “You take it period by period,” he said. “I know it’s all of the old clichés, shift by shift, but our backs are against the wall so we have to take it like that. That’s got to be our mentality. We’ve got to play our game. Play hard. Play smart. We really have to do things right because they’re a good team. Any mistakes and we’re done.”

Constantine isn’t even looking at it as one game at a time or just winning a period. To him, none of that matters. “When you start worrying about wins and losses you’re way ahead of yourself,” he said. “You’ve got to get into the process that turns you into a winner and focus on that.”

And the process is one of learning from game to game and applying the good things from the last game to the next game while cutting back on the bad things. “All we’ve talked about is how have the first three games gone,” he said. “What did we learn from the first three games, how did Game Three go as opposed to Game Two, and what did we learn from Game Three. All of those things trying to prepare us to do our best job in Game Four. That’s all we’ve talked about.”

As for the guys during the skate, they looked loose. They didn’t appear uptight, and they didn’t appear worried about tonight’s game. They worked on their shots. Khudobin and Schaefer worked on blocks and rebounds.

Danny Irmen says he’s trying not to focus on Manitoba: “They’re an experienced team, and a lot of them have been here before. We’ve just got to worry about ourselves and not worry about them. We’ve got to focus on what we’ve got to do right.”

As to the actual game, Hrkac says it all comes down to the first period: ‘We have to have a good first period. Tie it at least.”

I think Mr. Hrkac has been looking at the numbers, because, while kind of bleak, the numbers speak truth. Manitoba is 9-0 when it scores first, and it is 7-0 when it has the lead after the first period. The Aeros are 1-7 when they let the other team score first, and they are a miserable 0-8 when trailing after the first. But if the Aeros can get the lead or a tie at the end of the first, they’re 8-1.

So forget all of the other numbers. The numbers at the end of the first period are all that matters. If Houston can get on the board first and at least hold it to a tie, then they just might be able to pull out at least one game of the series. Otherwise, it’s all over.