Great story from Alex Steen last night.

[jeSteR]

So I was listening to the Team 1040 broadcast of the game last night and a really great story came out about Alex Steen's GWG from the Dec 5th game against us.

Apparently, Steen was continually matched up against Erhoff in the faceoff circle and Erhoff was lining up parallel right against him all night long and forcing the issue with body position. Steen also noticed that Malhotra was winning almost all the face offs and pulling it lightly back for Erhoff to swing in an pick up on the first stride. So what does he do?

All game long, whenever they had to line up for a face off, Steen would continually "tap" Erhoffs toe with his stick. I'm sure that it was more than just a love peck. He did this continually for every face off. Sure enough, on that face off just to the right of Lu in the thrid period, Erhoff got sick of it and lined up Perpendicular to Steen instead of shoulder to shoulder so that Steen couldn't "tap" his toe. And what do you know, Malhotra won the draw, but because Erhoff had to make a 90° turn with the initial push off, and his shoulder wasn't right up against Steen's to body him sideways immediately, Steen jumped out and beat him to the puck, slid across the slot and put it away right off the face off.

I thought it was a cool story about how all the little things really do matter when you get to that level of competition.