DETROIT —Patrick Kane, whose crunch time heroics have earned him the nickname ‘Showtime,’ is accustomed to playing the hero, but after scoring the overtime winner in Tuesday night’s 3–2 victory over the Ottawa Senators, he deferred to the evening’s breakout stars.
Anton Forsberg had been excellent in the Senator crease, and the Red Wings hadn’t shown the best of their game for most of the night, but when Jake Sanderson went to the box for hooking two minutes and 10 seconds into the extra session, Detroit’s path to victory was clear, and Kane swaggered down it as only he can.
Dylan Larkin won the draw back. Kane paused for a moment, dusted the puck off, then wired the puck past Forsberg’s blocker. In celebration, he dropped to a knee in celebration for a windmilling fist pump, before crossing himself and pointing skyward. It was not a sudden profession of devotion but rather an homage to a coterie of nuns who’d earned Jumbotron celebrity over the course of the evening.
“I mean, it’s always fun to play in overtime, right?” Kane said, grinning, some 20 minutes after his winning goal, and it’s not hard to see how he arrived at that perspective. Kane hardly needed the sign of the cross to mark himself as blessed: The shot, the hands, the composure, and the embrace of the game’s biggest moments already made that clear.
Rick Osentoski, Imagn Images
“It’s hard to score in this league,” said forward Joe Veleno when asked about his own exuberant celebration after netting a third-period equalizer (one Kane described as the evening’s second best, presumably trailing only his own), before nodding over to Kane, seated beside him at the podium. “Maybe not for him.”
“I’m honored to be his coach to tell you the truth,” added Todd McLellan of Kane. “You watch him all those years and try to solve him all those years. I’m glad I don’t have to do that. His poise with the puck is uncanny—how he can slow things down, speed it up. Probably an underrated shot. I never gave him enough credit for a shot like that that he scored. Quietly leads, goes about his business, and everybody kinda follows, so yeah, it’s nice having him around for sure.”
Of course overtime is fun for the blessed Kane, for whom three-on-three is little more than a playground and a four-on-three power play almost unfair. “No matter what…