LM Otero/AP PhotoTroy Brouwer , left, celebrates his goal with teammate Paul Stastny during the second period of Game 7 of their Western Conference semifinal series against the Stars in Dallas on Wednesday night.
DALLAS — It was the pot that took turns moving from back burner to front all through the Western Conference semifinal, but it was always there on the stovetop, bubbling … Could Lindy Ruff find a warm body to give the Dallas Stars a consistent effort in goal? He thought he had.
After being pulled from Game 2 and reinstalled as the starter from Game 4 onward, Kari Lehtonen had teased his coach. Made him believe again.
And then came Game 7, and the pot boiled over.
Lehtonen surrendered three first-period goals, all of them soft, and when his replacement, Antti Niemi, was beaten from the right wing by a David Backes slapshot 3:50 into the second, it was all over but the crying in Big D.
It ended 6-1, Patrick Eaves scoring the Stars’ lone goal 5:15 into the third period, but that was merely a scoresheet notation, as was Vladimir Tarasenko’s empty-net goal.
Who knows if the Stars were good enough to beat the St. Louis Blues? Their goaltending never gave them a fighting chance to find out.
So Ken Hitchcock’s Blues, with Brian Elliott solidly restored to the net after his own misadventure in Game 6, prevailed over the West’s No. 1 seed, having eliminated the defending champion Blackhawks in the first round, and that should just about end the chatter about Hitchcock’s job security.
Eighteen skaters a side, there wasn’t a lot of difference between the Stars and Blues, but between the pipes it was no contest.
No coach likes to admit publicly that his team is unable to overcome bad goaltending, but nothing will sink a ship faster.
Right to the end, prior to Wednesday’s season-ending defeat, Ruff maintained the stiff upper lip.
“A lot of times you learn from your losses. It hardens you, makes you better,” he said of Lehtonen’s checkered past.
All the pulling of the goalies meant, Ruff said, was that it was a close, tension-filled series. Not in Game 7, it wasn’t. American Airlines Arena was half-empty by the third period.
“If you happen to pull the plug, you pull the plug just to try to change the direction,” Ruff said. “Some nights it’s just not their night. It’s no different than a defenceman having a bad a night (but) they don’t get called out as much a goaltender does, because a goaltender is the last stop in the mechanism before it goes in the net.”
It definitely wasn’t Lehtonen’s night Wednesday.
The big Finn, who had trouble subduing the puck all series, couldn’t control Troy Brouwer’s rebound five minutes in and Robby Fabbri shoveled the loose puck home to put the first knife in.
The Blues looked as though they had gone up 2-0 in the 18th minute when Tarasenko spun and fired from a bad angle and the puck went in off Lehtonen’s equipment. But Ruff challenged the goal for offside and won — Tarasenko’s trailing skate was inches off the ice as Jaden Schwartz carried the puck over the line.
So the goal was wiped out and four seconds were put back on the clock. Big reprieve? Um, no.
Paul Stastny scored 43 seconds later from no angle at all, the puck squeezing between Lehtonen’s pad and glove on the short side, and then the final indignity: Patrik Berglund, just trying to get a shot off before time ran out on the period, wristed one from just inside the blue line.
Remember those four seconds? Berglund’s shot, possibly screened, went in with 3.4 seconds left.
That’s kind of how it was going.
In all, Ruff yanked his starter three times in seven games; Hitchcock just once.
Unlike Ruff, the Blues coach had only one moment’s pause. After Elliott was beaten three times on seven shots in Game 6, he had to decide whether that was an isolated incident in an otherwise heroic playoff run by the 31-year-old ‘keeper, or a harbinger of things to come in the one game that now mattered.
Later, Hitchcock called it a no-brainer, and Elliott was terrific, saving all 25 shots in the first 40 minutes while the Blues were building a 5-0 lead on just 17 shots.
By then, each member of the Stastny-Fabbri-Brouwer line had a goal and two assists; Brouwer, playing in a Game 7 for his eighth consecutive series, added the fifth goal late in the second.
In fairness, Dallas wouldn’t have made it to Game 7 if Lehtonen hadn’t turned his game around, if only briefly. But it was a long leap from there to saying Ruff had no lingering worries about a goalie who hadn’t had a stellar playoff career.
Hitchcock had been asked how he made his roster decisions for a Game 7 and said: “I know this (game) is going to be played with a lot of emotion and a lot of intensity, and I want people who are not going to spit the bit when that happens.”
Lindy Ruff wanted those people, too. He came up a couple short.
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