The pass from Lane Hutson skitters across the ice and you wonder — are these two already so perfectly synchronized that they make allowance for the bounces, for the extra milliseconds it will take to arrive?
Patrik Laine’s stick has already begun its descent, graceful as a falcon after a mouse. It seems too pretty to cause any damage until stick meets puck and the puck becomes rubberized heat, a blur no one quite sees until it has blown past the goaltender and nestled in the back of the net.
Get a stick in front of that shot, as Red Wings defender Moritz Seider did in Detroit, and it becomes a souvenir, a shattered memory of a hockey stick. The puck barely notices. It’s in the net, after all. The next day, to prove it wasn’t a fluke, Laine blows up Seider’s stick again, only this time the puck deflects into the netting. No matter, he still gets his power-play goal on a shot that was really a pass meant for Juraj Slafkovsky. When you’re this hot, even your passes end up in the net.
Nine games.
Eight power-play goals.
The first player on record to score eight straight power-play goals for a team — and Laine’s feat came, essentially, without the benefit of training camp, after missing 24 games from the start of the season with a knee injury. The injury itself followed a mental-health timeout, which followed an up-and-down stint in Columbus, following a brutal initiation to the NHL from a Winnipeg Jets room that was less than welcoming to a young and perhaps somewhat fragile free spirit.
Under the circumstances, Laine would have been forgiven a no-goal December, even here. Instead, he is everywhere. He’s on Instagram, mumbling about looking for patties as he wanders through a supermarket, joking about calling the manager. He’s photographed sauntering across a parking lot wearing a purple suit and matching purple tie and giving the photographer a jaunty thumbs up. He never enters the Bell Centre or any other rink without, well, making an entrance. The clothes are legend, right down to the black-and-white Holstein cow pants. The crooked half-smile is legend. The blue shades are legend. The goals are legend.
The man is legend.
How long will the Fab Finn be here? How long can he keep it up? Who knows? Inevitably, the fuss-budgets are fussing. “Why doesn’t he have any 5-on-5 goals?” “Are the Canadiens relying too much on Laine?” And their favourite: “But will the Habs make the playoffs?”
Hush. Just watch. A meteor like this one streaks across the sky no more than once every other ice age. Don’t miss it because you were trying to calculate Laine’s Relative Expected Goal Percentage.
Laine is a much-needed reminder that now and then, we need to unlax and simply enjoy sports again. Take a break. Stop parsing every thing into megabits of data. Quit fussing over 2Cs and right-shot Ds and AAVs and cap hits and watch the man do this thing.
Streaks are mysterious. In 1941, with much of the world already at war, Joe DiMaggio hit safely in 56 consecutive games and failed in the 57th. Phil Kessel, that paragon of beer-and-pizza training, played 1,064 consecutive games while the lean and mean Greek gods around him broke down like plaster statues.
You never know. Perhaps it will be goodbye in Columbus Monday night, or the Stanley Cup champs in Florida will shut him down, or the thunderbolt won’t sizzle in Tampa. That’s the beauty of a streak like this, its ephemeral quality. Here today, a memory tomorrow. Nothing is forever. That’s the essence of being human.
With a considerable assist from the fleet, unfettered and unpredictable brilliance of 20-year-old Lane Hutson (who is on his own streak with 14 points in the last 12 games) Laine has taken a bleak mid-winter and breathed some life into it. He has reminded us what it’s like to be a child and simply gawp at something. Did you see Willie make that catch? Did you see Bobby go airborne after that goal? Is it true that Wilt scored 100?
Somewhere out there today, a 10-year-old kid is working on his slapshot, firing away in the driveway, shot after shot. The garage door is badly bruised. Chances are the kid will never hit anything but the garage door but it won’t matter. He has a dream. He wants to be Patrik Laine, as kids before him wanted to be the Rocket, Le Gros Bill, the Roadrunner, the Flower, so he’s out there chasing the dream.
Laine’s run is a Christmas gift from he to thee. Settle back, have another eggnog with or without a tot of rum, and wallow in it.
Happy holidays, all.
Heroes: Jake Evans, Lane Hutson, Arber Xhekaj, Emil Heineman, Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, Samuel Montembeault, Alexandre Carrier, Laura Stacey, Oleksandr Usyk, Reece Howden, Rickey Henderson &&&& last but not least, Patrik Laine.
Zeros: The College Football Playoff, Drake, Aaron Rodgers, Wayne Gretzky, Mark Gastineau, Deion Sanders, Tom Brady, Bud Selig Jr., Claude Brochu, David Samson &&&& last but not least, Jeffrey Loria.
Now and forever.
jacktodd46.bsky.social