MINI-PREVIEW 7:30 AM EST
The Flyers (9-4-2) have often been less stellar coming off long layoffs. After three nights off and a couple days of off-ice "team bonding" in North Carolina, the Flyers return to action tonight to take on a Carolina Hurricanes (8-7-0) team that Philly defeated by a 3-2 score ten days ago. The Flyers also swept last year's season series with the Canes.
But the Hurricanes have been playing good hockey of late, skating with a lot of energy and making opponents pay for their mistakes. On Tuesday, the club steamrolled Edmonton, 7-1. Early Calder Trophy candidate Jeff Skinner had a goal and two assists in the game. The Canes now rank fifth offensively in the NHL, averaging 3.13 goals per game and have scored at least 3 goals in four consecutive games. Most of the damage has been done at even strength (32 ESGs this season), as the powerplay has been one area where Carolina will be looking to pick up the pace. They've generated improved puck movement of late, however.
Whenever a team is coming off a lengthy layoff, there are three areas of particular concern: 1) Skating tempo in the first period, 2) Passing and turnovers, and 3) powerplay sharpness. The Flyers' powerplay was clicking prior to Sunday's game in Washington, but now they need to get the motor running again. They also need to reduce the number of careless penalties that have creeped up again in recent games.
Projected lineups (subject to change)
FLYERS
Nodl - Richards - Zherdev
Hartnell - Briere - Leino
Powe - Giroux - Carter
Shelley - Betts - Carcillo
Pronger - Carle
Coburn - Timonen
Meszaros - O'Donnell
Bobrovsky
[Boucher]
HURRICANES
Samsonov - Staal - LaRose
Tlusty - Sutter - Dwyer
Skinner - Ruutu - Cole
Jokinen - Matsumoto - Kostopoulos
McBain - Pitkanen
Corvo - Gleason
Babchuk - Harrison
Ward
[Peters]
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Today's
Daily Drop at Versus.com looks at Lindy Ruff's milestone of 1,000 games coaching the Buffalo Sabres. He is just the third coach in NHL history to coach that many games with one club.
My
Janne Niinimaa article at NHL.com was posted yesterday afternoon. The piece looks at Niinimaa's up-and-down career and resurgence this season playing for Lulea HF in Sweden.
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At the time Pelle Lindbergh died 25 year ago, he and fiancee Kerstin Pietzsch were planning their wedding at the Sofia Church in Stockholm for the summer of 1986. The couple had no children, but Pelle and Kerstin planned to start a family. He was always crazy about kids.
Five years after Pelle's death, Kerstin met and married Kurt Somnell after relocating back to Sweden. The couple recently celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary. They have three children, daughters Mikaela and Petra and son, Jens.
On Dec. 27, 2006, when I visited the home of Anna-Lisa Lindbergh (Pelle's mother), I was told by Thomas Tynander, the sole author of the Swedish edition and co-author of the English edition of Pelle Lindbergh: Behind the White Mask, that photos hanging on the wall of the living room were of Kerstin's three children as well as the children of her daughters, Ann-Louise and the late Ann-Christine.
I asked Anna-Lisa about Kerstin's kids.
"I consider them my grandchildren, too. I love them," she said.
Jens Somnell took to playing hockey early. Like Pelle, he plays goal.
"We feel like Pelle is watching over Jens and he's very happy," said Ann-Louise, who was also present at the family home that night, along with her husband Goran.
In today's Philadelphia Daily News, Frank Seravalli offers a
special retrospective on Pelle's life, focusing primarily on Kerstin and Jens.
Last year, shortly prior to the submission of the final English draft of the Pelle book, Kerstin told Thomas and I that she had never been back to Philadelphia since moving out of the area in the summer of 1986. She had thought about coming back for a visit many, many times but had allowed herself to fall out of contact with the Flyers family and people she had once been close with, such as Ilkka Sinisalo and his family.
Earlier this year, Kerstin rectified the situation. She came to Philly for a visit, bringing husband Kurt and son Jens. The family came to a Flyers game. Jens, whom has heard a lot about the Flyers and Pelle from his mother, had the time of his life -- much like when a young Pelle saw his first NHL game in Toronto as a pre-teen and had his father buy him a Flyers jersey rather than a Maple Leafs sweater from a fan shop.
Following are some final unpublished excerpts for this week from the Pelle book. These segments come from Chapter 4 of the book, focusing on Pelle's childhood and youth hockey days. I hope you enjoy!
***
Pelle’s summer trip with the Hammarby youth hockey team gets him a reprieve from the classroom. Coach Curt Lindström takes his group of boys born in 1959 to practice and play in the industrial city of Västerås, located 62 miles west of Stockholm in the central Swedish province of Västmanland. The kids play at the Rocklunda Ice Hall.
Pelle’s best friend on the team is Tommy Nilsson (who later legally changes his surname to Boustedt). Tommy started out as a fellow goaltender, but soon told his parents that he wanted to be a position player. He later made the switch. Had he remained a goalie, he probably would have spent most of his time watching Pelle play.
“Obviously, with a goalie like Pelle on the team, we were outstanding,” Boustedt remembers years later.
When Pelle’s not training with the team, he can usually be found inventing games or leading his friends on adventures outside. His favorite non-sports activity during this trip is going out to find pet frogs. He does it at home, too. Anna-Lisa is never quite sure what visitor from the animal kingdom Pelle is going to bring home next. Once he found a small copper snake and kept it in a shoebox under his bed.
Pelle and Tommy crawl around in ditches, fields and lakes searching for the elusive amphibians. When he finally succeeds in catching one in a glass jar, he jumps for joy.
“You wouldn’t believe how much Pelle loved hunting for those damn frogs,” Boustedt later recalls with a laugh.
***
While there aren’t very many school subjects that Pelle enjoys, he loves to socialize inside and outside the yellow stone schoolhouse with the black tin roof. In addition to best friends Mikael Nordh and Björn Neckman, Pelle quickly develops a wide social circle.
It’s fair to say that Pelle’s favorite subjects in school are recess, lunch and gym.
The older kids at school – who rarely speak to, let alone want to pal around with children in younger grades – seek out Pelle’s friendship once they see that he’s more able to hold his own against them in sports.
Even the notoriously salty lunchroom ladies are charmed by Pelle’s unbridled enthusiasm and the polite manners his parents instilled in him. He’s one of the few kids who actually seems to enjoy school cafeteria food.
“They loved us,” Neckman recalls with a laugh. “We loaded up our trays with food and Pelle would always eat everything he took.”
Usually, gym class is one of the only few in-class parts of the day that pass by quickly for Pelle. But Neckman recalls one year early in their school career where he and Pelle had the swimming teacher from hell.
The Sofia school has more amenities than the majority of comparable American public schools built around the same period (especially in working class neighborhoods), including an on-site dentist and a large swimming pool.
It was mandatory for all the kids to take swimming lessons as part of their physical education curriculum.
“The swim teacher was this real nasty uncle of a guy who wore these white wooden clogs and used to kick us if we didn’t do what he said. We learned to swim pretty quickly,” Neckman remembers. “But before we could go underwater to swim, we had to sit back-to-back in these small bathtubs. Then our heads were dunked and held under the water.”
The kids are terrified. But in the years to come, Björn can always get Pelle to crack up laughing at the mention of the class where the “sink or swim” method of instruction was taken a little too seriously.
There is one school class that Pelle absolutely loves. Not surprisingly, it relates to hockey. Every Wednesday before lunch, he and several classmates go to the Ice Stadium for two hours of training on the ice.
But Pelle scarcely needs an excuse to play hockey. When he was younger, he even played inside the front lobby of the apartment building, using a miniature stick. Neighbors complained to Anna-Lisa and Sigge about the racket Pelle and his friends made. The boys soon moved their games outdoors. Pelle plays hockey at recess, after school and on the weekends on the spoiled ground underneath his family’s living room balcony.
“He thought these were damn good games, so he really had a blast,” Neckman says. “We’d skate the whole time and later played shinny where Pelle would be a position player. We had two nets on the ice. A lot of kids brought along their skates.”
One of the nets belonged to Pelle. It was a Christmas gift from his parents. Purchased in 1967, Pelle made use of it until he moved away from home. He stored it near the towel rack in the bathroom of his family’s apartment, with his sweat-soaked goalie equipment and uniforms. Anna-Lisa works hard to keep up.
“We had the washing machine going constantly,” she says.
But not even Anna-Lisa is a match for combating the stench of sweaty hockey equipment. It’s a losing battle.
“It really smelled like a lockerroom in their bathroom,” Björn Neckman laughs.
***
Pelle Lindbergh and Björn Neckman can hardly believe their ears: Many of the NHL’s biggest stars are coming to Sweden – and they’re coming to the nearby Johanneshov’s Ice Stadium, no less!
In September 1972, Team Canada comes to Stockholm for two exhibition games against Tre Kronor in preparation for the upcoming Summit Series against the Soviet Union. A local newspaper holds a contest in which the winner gets the opportunity to see Team Canada practice before the exhibitions. Björn wins the contest and brings Pelle along.
In addition, prior to the first exhibition game, Pelle and the majority of Hammarby’s ’58 Gang get to meet the Canadian players for a mini-ceremony in which the youngsters presented Swedish gifts to the Canadians. Several players returned the favor by giving the kids hockey presents.
Among the players Pelle meets is Bobby Clarke, the 23-year-old burgeoning star center for the Philadelphia Flyers, for whom the Summit Series marks a breakthrough in his career. Pelle’s friend, Anders Lånström, receives Clarke’s stick as Lindbergh stands nearby.
During the game, Bobby Hull puts on a jaw-dropping display of his shooting skills with his banana-curved stick.
“We were extremely impressed by a goal that Hull scored. He skated up to the red line and fired a rising shot that went right up under the crossbar,” Neckman remembers.
Even Pelle – who, in his hockey fantasies, can stop any shot at any time – can’t fathom how it’d be possible to stop Hull’s guided missile, despite the distance from which he shot it. The puck has wicked movement on it, starting ankle high and ending up going over the goalie’s shoulder in the blink of an eye.
Team Canada wins the first game. The team’s tie the second game. Both are sloppily played games with a lot of penalty minutes. Play turns a bit nasty after Canada’s Wayne Cashman catches a high stick from Ulf Sterner flush in the mouth, going off for 30 stitches and spitting out teeth.
“Cool!” the young Hammarby players exclaim.
Cashman and the other Team Canada players don’t exactly share the kids’ sentiments.
****
When Pelle is 15, he discovers the play of Bernie Parent – the goaltender who becomes his idol and, later, his mentor and dear friend. In so doing, he fully adopts the Philadelphia Flyers as his favorite club in the NHL.
After the completion of each hockey season, Curre Lindström throws a party for all the Hammarby youth teams. The boys eat finger food, gulp down soft drinks and the top players receive awards.
This year, he’s arranged for a special guest to attend: Sune Bergqvist, a former star for Hammarby IF in hockey, soccer and bandy who also played as a keeper for Sweden’s national soccer team. Now confined to a wheelchair after a serious car accident, Bergqvist speaks to the young players. The boys are transfixed by the local legend dialectically known as “Svenne Berka”.
“Pelle listened carefully because he knew that Svenne Berka was a big goalie,” Lindström recalls.
But it’s not the Bergqvist visit that makes the most lasting impression on Pelle. Rather, it’s the films of the 1974 Stanley Cup Finals that Lindström has rented and shown on a film projector against a white wall.
Lindbergh watches Parent lead the Flyers to victory over the favored Boston Bruins to capture the team’s first Stanley Cup, punctuated by a 1-0 shutout win in the deciding game. That year, Parent also wins the Vezina Trophy as the NHL’s best goaltender and the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player in the playoffs.
As soon as the film ends, Lindbergh asks Lindström to play it again. He then wants to see it a third time. All the while, he watches Parent intently.
The following year, the Flyers repeat as Stanley Cup champions with Parent duplicating his individual honors from the previous season. With permission from Sigge and Anna-Lisa, Pelle orders super-8 films of the 1974 and 1975 Finals directly from the NHL offices. He plays them over and over.
By now, Pelle is consumed by Parent and the Flyers. He wants to wear a mask exactly like Parent’s and wear Parent’s Number 1 on his jersey. From the films he’s bought, we studies every nuance of the future Hall of Famers style and mannerisms in net. Moreover, Lindbergh dreams of playing for Parent’s Philadelphia Flyers after his hero retires.
One of Pelle’s two closest childhood friends is a classmate named Björn Neckman, whom he’s known since his early years at the Sofia school. Neckman shares Pelle’s love of hockey and is a frequent participant in the neighborhood pickup games. Years later, he comes to the USA and lives with Pelle during his first professional season.
“Pelle didn’t just say that he’d play in the NHL. He said he’d play just for the Flyers, and this is when we weren’t very old,” Neckman remembers. “We watched those films from the NHL games at Pelle’s home against his white bedroom door. Sigge taught us how the projector work and afterwards we were set. We watched the films for many years, countless times.”
Doing homework and studying for exams at school isn’t much for a priority for Pelle. On one occasion, Pelle writes a note on a flunked test paper. In huge block letters, it reads, “This means nothing to me. I’m going to be the goaltender for the Philadelphia Flyers.”
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