Certain hockey games truly are fit to be tied

By AL STRACHAN -- Toronto Sun If there was ever a game that deserved to be a tie, this was it.
Both the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Carolina Hurricanes had stretches of domination. Both looked sloppy on occasion. Both seemed to be working hard at some points and not at others.
So there were no complaints when it ended in a 3-3 tie last night.
"We didn't play particularly well, I didn't think, for about 27 minutes," Carolina coach Paul Maurice said. "That's a long time to not play particularly well.
"But I thought that from the 13-minute mark to the end of the second period, we really controlled the game and forechecked and got them back on their heels.
"The third period was played fairly even. We traded far more chances than we wanted to. I didn't think it was a particularly well-played game either way. There were a lot of whistles. I think it was fair both ways, but it was tough to get a read out there.
"It was a pretty fair result given that it was pretty sloppy out there."
Leafs general manager/coach Pat Quinn felt that his team blew too many chances and made too many mental errors -- which led to the changes in flow that Maurice mentioned. Quinn also saw the 13-minute mark as the turning point and said that his team returned to a "brain-dead" type of play.
"I don't mean to denigrate Carolina but we kind of gave a point away in my opinion," Quinn said.
The bright side was a patchwork line thrown together by Quinn which opened the scoring for the Leafs. The oft-injured Alyn McCauley was between the oft-scratched Steve Sullivan and the oft-maligned Tie Domi.
The line is a good blend. Domi provides the grit; Sullivan is the sniper; and McCauley is the two-way player who makes the plays, sees the ice well and is never out of position.
They got a lot of ice time until the line was broken up when Todd Warriner suffered a knee injury and Sullivan moved up to replace him, but Quinn indicated that the line would be reunited.
"It had some jump, didn't it?" he asked rhetorically. "It gives us some speed and a little bit of toughness. Alyn is slowly getting better. He had some games where he was going north when he should have been going south and all sorts of things. I think scoring (his first goal of the season last night) took some of the pressure off him because he sees himself as wanting to be a scorer as many of the young men do. That will relieve some of the pressure for him. That didn't look like a bad unit."
Domi certainly enjoyed it. "It was nice to see Al get a goal," he said. "I told him, 'Don't worry. I'm looking out for you and everybody on the other team knows that,' so it was no secret."
The line was so effective that it was rewarded with power-play time, which Domi rarely gets.
"We almost scored too," Domi said with a laugh.

'Who cares?'
"There's no crease rule. I was sticking my (butt) right in there and (Carolina goaltender Arturs Irbe) was shouting at me. But who cares?"
Later in the game, though, the Hurricanes came back with some net-jamming of their own and Gary Roberts narrowed the gap to 3-2.
"They took that crease rule away so that's one goal for me that wouldn't have counted last year," he said. "I had about five called back last year. It was not a pretty goal, but not many of mine are."
For that matter, not much of the game was pretty.
"It was a very slow game," Roberts said. "The ice was terrible, so there were lots of bouncing pucks. There was not a lot of flow, but there were a lot of whistles."
Even in the overtime, the Leafs' first crack at the new four-on-four format, it wasn't as wide open as has been the case throughout the NHL. Some of that had to do with the fact that the Leafs were killing a penalty for the first 1:50.
"We've never practised four-on-three," Quinn said, "but we're going to."
And McCauley, Sullivan and Domi probably will get some practice time together too.

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