GAME 3
Flames 3
Lightning 0
CALGARY – Here’s the thing about the “C” of Red. It does not part.
In a game that featured the unlikeliest of unlikely sights of Vincent Lecavalier dropping his gloves to start a fight with Jarome Iginla in the first period and then Krzysztof Oliwa being utilized on the Flames’ first line for a couple of shifts in the second, Calgary physically manhandled the Lightning and completely negated Tampa Bay’s speed and skill game last night for a 3-0 Game 3 victory and thus will take a 2-1 lead into tomorrow night’s fourth game of the Stanley Cup Finals.
The advance men promised that this would be a series featuring skill. Not so far. Rather, it’s been a series that’s featured as much grabbing both away from the puck and on the puck-carrier as any in memory.
That doesn’t mean that the games haven’t been conducted at a high tempo; they have. But the anticipated exchange of scoring chances simply has not materialized. There’s been no space whatsoever in which to maneuver.
“Everybody knows what’s on the line,” said Iginla, who added a goal and an assist to his bout. “They raised their physical level in the second game and we responded the same way in this game. The fight was just part of the overall intensity.”
Last night’s match – the first Cup Finals game in Canada since 1994 – was played with the same snarl with which Thursday’s Game 2 in Tampa had ended. Indeed, scrums developed after nearly every whistle.
The antipathy between the clubs was punctuated by the fight between the team’s banner-carriers, Lecavalier and Iginla, at the 6:17 mark of the first to complete a shift in which the players sparred from center ice down behind the Calgary net. It was a scene from a quarter-century ago and beyond, when marquee players such as Clark Gillies routinely dropped their gloves when the situation called for such action.
“I think that Jarome’s fight was huge; that set the physical tone for us,” said Ranger parolee Chris Simon, whose power-play goal at 13:53 of the second broke a scoreless tie and stood up in front of Mikka Kiprusoff’s fifth shutout of the tournament.
“We talked before the game that we had to take away Tampa’s time and space, and I thought we did a good job of that all night.”
And if Calgary wasn’t doing the job, the Bolts were their own worst enemy. Martin St. Louis, banged at every opportunity by Calgary’s big defense, had a dreadful game at both ends of the ice. Brad Richards couldn’t create. Lecavalier, whose fight was applauded on the bench by coach John Tortorella, couldn’t generate anything at all, and indeed it was an attempted centering feed of his that went awry that sent the Flames away on the two-on-one that finished with the Shean Donovan goal that made it 2-0 late in the second.
If there was a turning point in the game, it came when Kiprusoff made a lunging save on a Richards’ right wing semi-breakaway wrist shot just moments before Simon converted on the power play and leaped into the glass to celebrate.