Breakaway

Chapter 16 - Breakaway

ERIC

We'd lost the game to Phoenix in overtime. When we got home and played Florida, we barely scraped out a win. Chicago beat us easily because we completely fell apart out on the ice. We'd come home for a game against Vancouver on St. Patrick's Day, where we managed to scrape out a shoot-out win, but we didn't deserve it. We'd played like shit through three of those four games.

Well, three and a half, actually. If Florida had managed to capitalize on the chances we'd allowed them, they could have beaten us handily. Lucky for us, they hadn't.

One of the biggest problems, at least according to Scotty (and for that matter, according to me) was that I wasn't scoring. I could complain about how he kept changing my linemates, but the truth was it had nothing to do with that. I've always been able to score no matter who I was playing with—my whole career. I'd been able to in peewee, in high school, in college, and in the pros. That was one of the main reasons I'd been given the big contract I was currently trying and failing to live up to.

I might have been letting all the stuff with Dana get to me, but I didn't think that was the case. On the ice, at least, I'd been able to focus on the job at hand. More likely I was letting the pressure of trying to get the team back into the playoffs get to me.

Also, Hammer told me I was squeezing my stick. He was probably right. It was really hard to stop doing that once you start, though.

Everyone goes through scoring slumps in the league. It happens. If you somehow get to the end of your career without a slump like this happening at key times, you're considered to be a clutch performer, a real leader. When you hit a slump right when your team needs you to pull through the most? They say you choked.

I wasn't oblivious. I knew what they were saying about me, the national hockey media. The Storm had been on a downhill slide ever since I'd become captain, and they were pointing to my struggles right now as evidence I that couldn't cut it when it mattered. It was easy to put the blame on my shoulders instead of looking at any of the other mitigating factors involved—the poor management over the last few years before Jim Sutter came in, the multiple coaching changes, the constant roster turnover.

I needed to play better. Absolutely. I needed to lead better. But I wasn't the only problem. I couldn't believe that. If I let myself believe that, I might as well call it quits today, hang up my skates, and not look back.

No matter how I looked at it, though, this was not a good time for me to have a scoring slump. Not when every game could be the difference between the Portland Storm finally getting back into the playoffs or not. Not when we had so many guys injured and out of the lineup, when we were depending on so many rookies and AHL-level call-ups to fill those roles.

And it kept getting worse. We lost Pasha in the game against Chicago. He'd been racing for the puck and got tangled up with a Blackhawks defender, then went into the boards with his leg at a really awkward angle. He tore his ACL and was due to have season-ending surgery right after Casino Night.

That meant one of our best goal scorers was gone. That meant another call-up was on his way.

In last night's game, Razor twisted his ankle. Just a high ankle sprain and not a break, at least, but he was still going to miss at least a week.

There was only a little over a week left in the season.

Razor hadn't become the type of scoring defenseman everyone said he would become. Not yet, at least, but it was still just his first season in the league. The kid could move the puck well and get it out of our end and into the offensive zone pretty quickly. We needed him, and now we didn't have him.