Twenty Great Games is a PITB feature that will run through the month of December, examining the 20 greatest single-game Canuck performances of the last 15 years. Today: Roberto Luongo's historic playoff debut.
Roberto Luongo waited seven years (or 28, if you want to think in terms of his whole life) for an NHL playoff game. Drafted by the New York Islanders then traded to Florida Panthers, two franchises allergic to the postseason, the 1997 4th overall pick played an absurd 342 regular-season games before a trade to Vancouver finally made the postseason possible.
"I can't wait to get going," he told the media as his playoff debut with the Dallas Stars approached. "I've been waiting for a long, long time and it's finally here."
But Luongo had to wait almost as long for the damned thing to end. When regulation ended with the Canucks and Stars tied at four, the game continued into overtime. And continued. And continued. Finally, at 12:32am, five hours and 21 minutes after the game began, and just two minutes before a fifth overtime, the Canucks scored.
By then, Luongo had faced an NHL record 76 shots, and made 72 saves, second all-time. With a gruelling 78:06 of OT, it remains the longest game of the NHL’s modern, post-lockout era. Luongo's first playoff game had outlasted two regular-season games.
"That's one to remember, that's for sure," said Luongo, in the understatement of his career up to that point.
In the leadup to the game, media local and national had made much of Luongo’s relative inexperience. Their big concern was the pressure.
"I find that question silly," Luongo said in response, adding, "You don't get any more pressure than when I played against the Czechs in the World Cup.” Pretty naive, in hindsight. Again, this was in 2007. Eight years on, one assumes that if you asked Luongo about his highest-pressure moments in goal, relieving Martin Brodeur at the World Cup doesn’t even crack the top ten. Hell, it's not even the most highest-pressure instance in which he replaced Martin Brodeur.
But Luongo did look a little unnerved in the game’s early going. The Stars’ first goal squeaked through his pads; the second looked stoppable as well. And when Luongo was unable to preserve his team’s two-goal lead in the final period some fans began wondering if their guy was choking.
He wasn’t choking, though. His team kinda was -- the Stars outshot the Canucks 16-3 in the third -- but Luongo definitely was not, as evidenced by the 80+ minutes of shutout hockey immediately following the Stars' fourth goal. Rather, he was settling in. "I could tell the nervousness was out of the way by the second or third overtime," Luongo said.
But now there was a new problem: fatigue. "After a couple of overtime periods guys were getting delirious," Luongo said.
Markus Naslund seconded the sentiment. “I'm completely and utterly exhausted,” he said. “I've never been so tired in my whole life. It was physically cruel."
And for head coach Alain Vigneault, the ordeal wasn’t even over yet, because he still had to go through all the game tape. "I'm just at the end of period five here," he told Iain MacIntyre the next afternoon. "I've still got two more periods to get through.”
Period five might have been Luongo's best. The Canucks forgot their legs for the second overtime; the Stars outshot them 12-3. Fortunately, while the skaters sagged, Roberto Luongo did not, perhaps because he'd been conserving his energy for this game for the better part of a decade. He was incredible and, feeding off of his strong play, the team bounced back in OT3. Then, in OT4, Henrik and Daniel Sedin finally said enough.
The game was such an ordeal that many members of the media became instant supporters of the playoff shootout. All the players were asked about it. Luongo was having none of it.
"I think we should stop analyzing everything about the game," he said. "That's the way it was intended to be. A game like last night will go down in history, so I don't see why we would change anything like that."
