I’d rather not milk Lucas Raymond’s hat trick against the Blackhawks last night, but we’ll “go there” one more time, for good reason:
97.1 the Ticket’s Will Burchfield notes that Raymond earned the most credit from coach Jeff Blashill not for scoring three goals in total, but instead, going to the front of the net and ending up face-first on the ice:
Raymond had it all working against Chicago. He scored early in the first when Bertuzzi forced a turnover in the Blackhawks’ zone and found him streaking toward the net; Raymond faked a shot and then slid the puck through the legs of Marc-Andre Fleury. He scored late in the second when he drove the net and knocked home a Larkin rebound — and paid the price by winding up on his stomach. And he scored midway through the third on a power-play one-timer.
It was the second goal, the ugly one, that Blashill may have liked the most.
“Lucas doesn’t shy away from really anything,” Blashill said. “He’s taken some hard hits and things like that and he’s not shy at all. He’s got an edge to him, for sure. And he’s certainly not shy about going to the net. But I also think there’s a habitual art that not only do you go to the net, but you gotta stop at the net. And that’s ultimately what he did.”
As Burchfield notes, Raymond–like Moritz Seider–is a fearless player, and his willingness to take no shit and give no f-you-know-what’s when people try to intimidate him physically may be his best quality:
Raymond’s on the smaller end of the NHL spectrum at 5’10, but he plays much bigger. He doesn’t let his size deter him from getting to the danger areas of the ice. He nearly took a face full of iron when he got knocked down from behind on his second goal and ate a whole bunch of twine instead — a trade he’ll make every time to put the puck in the net.
“If you want to score goals, you have to get into those areas,” he said. “You can’t just shoot and score fancy goals. You have to really get in there. That’s usually where most of the goals are scored, so trying to get in there more and more.
