Health scare, past injuries have Czech netminder focused on today
Tomas Vokoun #92 of the Pittsburgh Penguins makes a save in the second period against the Ottawa Senators in Game One of the Eastern Conference Semifinals during the 2013 NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs at Consol Energy Center on May 14, 2013 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Penguins defeated the Senators 4-1.
Photograph by: JUSTIN K. ALLER , GETTY IMAGES
PITTSBURGH — Tomas Vokoun gets nervous, sure. He’s 36, been a regular in the NHL since he was 22, but he still feels that bubbling fizz in his stomach before games.
It’s before the games that’s the worst part, he thinks. He was nervous when they put him in against the Islanders in Game 5 of the first round, but then he made a couple saves and it was fine. No, before the games, that’s when you feel it.
“If it means something to you, then you’re going to be nervous,” Vokoun said, soft-spoken and direct. “Everybody I know, if you really want something, you get nervous. So, I was nervous, just like anybody.”
Vokoun is currently the best thing the Pittsburgh Penguins have in net — the wheels came off Marc-Andre Fleury in the first round and Vokoun, signed to a bargain one-year, US $2-million deal at the start of the year, was given the crease.
He has stopped 101 of 105 shots in three wins since then; he’s been pretty good. But then, he’s always been pretty good. It’s just that his teams weren’t.
Ask Vokoun about the pressure he is under — the responsibility to backstop this team, which has been put together to win Stanley Cups and which came undone with Fleury and its defence last season — and the greying Czech all but shrugs.
“You look at it like, I’ve been sitting for years watching playoff hockey on my couch and I had no chance,” Vokoun said. “And sometimes it’s better to fail and be there than to never be there at all. I want to do well, I want my family and my friends to see me do well. But nervous and being tight because if we lose it’s the end of the world? I don’t feel that pressure here.”
Vokoun is a strange case as goaltenders go. He has led the league in losses twice, finished second once, finished third once. He has faced more shots than all but three other active NHL goaltenders. He has finished in the top 10 in save percentage five times, but in wins only twice. And since the 2004-05 lockout, he is second in save percentage among goaltenders with at least 200 starts — Tim Thomas is at .921 and Vokoun is at .920.
He had played in 11 playoff games before he was thrown in against the Islanders. In 2004, he lost a six-game playoff series to Detroit with a .939 save percentage — as Pittsburgh general manager Ray Shero, then with Nashville, puts it, “We took them to six games through him” — and lost in an unimpressive five to San Jose in 2007.
He had other chances, but they vanished.
In 2006, he was sidelined right before the playoffs by a scary blood disorder; last year, in Washington, he severely tore his groin five games before the playoffs began and it took six months to fully heal.
There is a part of goaltending that is luck — the inch between getting a piece of a puck that caroms like a pinball — but Vokoun has never been very lucky, career-wise. He has been the guy trying to keep the underdog in the game, never the guy trying to backstop the powerhouse. He’s never really had this kind of chance.
“Yeah, last year was tough,” said Vokoun, who unlike some goalies is built like a fullback, all heavily muscled thighs, butt and torso, an aging bull.
“That was probably the best I felt in my career, you know? It was really disappointing, because I was pretty close. We finally start playing well, we’re going into the playoffs and I get hurt five games before. It’s tough. It’s not easy.
“There’s a lot of fortunate people who are in the playoffs every year and for them it’s — I think sometimes you can’t control where you get drafted, or where you play and I got traded from Nashville to Florida and I really couldn’t do anything unless I asked for a trade or something and that was never my intention. It was very disappointing.
“(2006) was very disappointing that I didn’t get to play, but I was more worried if I was ever going to be playing again and if I’m going to be healthy and living. At that moment, I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I had massive blood clots behind my abdominal wall, which you know, when they found them, they didn’t know if it was a tumour or whatever. I was more worried about that than if I would play again.”
He spent two or three days waiting for the tests to come in — he would go to the doctor, look around the room and he would think about his six-year-old and one-year-old children at home. It turned out OK, but it wasn’t guaranteed to be.
“Full-body scans and there’s a lot of sick people sitting in the waiting room. I was still pretty young,” he said. “I would say I was freaking out.”
He is not freaking out, now; this is just hockey and he’s got a chance.
He said he feels bad for Fleury; as he puts it, “Sometimes you do the right things and you run into some bad circumstances, bad luck, whatever happens, and you can’t control that.”
Vokoun knows about that. He knows that sometimes you do everything right and just get beat, or sometimes you do it wrong and the shooter misses. The difference between being a great goalie and a disaster can be two or three mistakes.
When he doubts himself, he tells himself, ‘You couldn’t have just been lucky all this time.’
Time to find out.
“What could be better?” he said. “I mean, that’s why we lift weights in the summer and run and do all the stuff that I personally am not a fan of doing. But you do it so you get a chance like this, so you are ready for it.”
Vokoun has been waiting a hockey lifetime for this chance. It’s finally here.
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