Subban calls his shot: Guarantees Game 6 win

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This article was published 07/05/2018 (2803 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

We all remember Babe Ruth delivered on that called home run in the 1932 World Series, just as we remember Cassius Clay backed up his fourth-round knockout prediction in the Archie Moore fight, Joe Namath made good on his 1969 Super Bowl guarantee and Mark Messier, with a hat trick, made his guarantee of a win for the New York Rangers come true in Game 6 of the 1994 Eastern Conference final.

That’s the thing about bold, brash guarantees made by athletes: You remember them for a long time when they come true precisely because they were so bold and so brash.

But for every bold prediction from a guy like Namath or Messier, there’s a dozen guys like thoroughbred trainer Rick Dutrow, who guaranteed his horse, Big Brown, was going to win the Triple Crown back in 2008 only to see the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes winner finish dead last in the final jewel, the Belmont Stakes.

Nobody remembers Dutrow’s big promise or, for that matter, Big Brown, because, well, that’s the other thing about bold and brash guarantees: The guarantees that go bad — and the people who make them — are very forgettable.

All of which brings us back around to the subject of Nashville Predators defenceman P.K. Subban.

Subban, in case you missed it, made a bold and brash guarantee of his own Saturday night after his team’s 6-2 loss to the Winnipeg Jets at Bridgestone Arena.

“We’re going to go there, we’re going to win a game, we’re going to come back here. It’s that simple,” Subban told reporters.

“We’re going to wake up in the morning and the last page is going to be turned. We’re going to go to Winnipeg, we’re going to win a game, then we’re going to come back here.”

Now, it may very well turn out Subban is right — that the Predators do in fact defeat the Winnipeg Jets at Bell MTS Place in Game 6 tonight to tie the series 3-3 and force a deciding game in their second-round series on Thursday night in Nashville.

As guarantees go, it’s not exactly far-fetched. This is a series, after all, in which no team has yet won two games in a row. And while both teams boast two of the loudest and most hostile buildings in the league, the visiting team in this series has now posted more wins — three — than the home team — two.

So yeah, Subban’s prediction could very well come true, even with tens of thousands of Winnipeggers draped in white flooding downtown tonight and willing it to be otherwise.

But here’s the thing: you cannot help but get the feeling that Subban going out on a limb Saturday night — and then sawing halfway through it — had less to do with his desire to try out a new career as a fortune teller and more to do with Subban’s conviction that his team wins whenever he can make stuff happen, which is not infrequently.

Remember last year’s Stanley Cup final, in which Subban and the Predators quickly went down 0-2 to the Penguins and Subban changed the narrative by getting into a heated argument on the ice with Sidney Crosby during a Game 3 Nashville win then telling reporters it was all about Subban’s breath?

“He told me my breath smelled, but I mean, I don’t know, I used Listerine before the game,” Subban told reporters. “So I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

Subban’s allegation became the headline out of Game 3 and all the ensuing attention forced Crosby, the game’s greatest player, to take time out in the middle of a Stanley Cup final to deny he’d accused Subban of having bad breath, while not technically denying that Subban has bad breath.

“He likes the attention,” seethed Crosby at the time.

It was a ridiculous sideshow entirely orchestrated by Subban and it worked — he got under Crosby’s skin and the Preds promptly went on to win Game 4 too to tie the series 2-2, before Pittsburgh regained control and ultimately won their second straight Stanley Cup.

You can love Subban or hate him — and there seem to be equal numbers of hockey fans in both camps for the sport’s most polarizing figure, (with the exception, maybe, of the kissing bandit Brad Marchand.)

But what you cannot deny is that the only thing Subban’s better at than the game is gamesmanship. And the Norris Trophy nominee is pretty darn good at the game.

Jets fans have been all over Subban every time he touches the puck this series and while Subban has remained steadfast that he doesn’t even hear the boos — ‘What boos?’ he laughed when asked about it after Game 3 — his numbers on the ice say he hears every word and turns it into the fuel that fires him.

Subban has three goals and five points in five games this series and four of those points — two goals and two assists — came in the two games that were in Winnipeg, suggesting that not only is the vitriol of Jets fans not hurting Subban’s game, it’s actually probably helping.

So what does Subban do Saturday night after he and his the Preds got their asses handed to them by the Jets in their own building?

Well, Subban doubled down, of course, by insulting both the Jets and their fans in declaring a Predators win in Winnipeg in Game 6 Monday night a “simple” and foregone conclusion.

Make no mistake: Subban knew exactly what he was doing in making that statement — he was making sure that in the biggest game of the season for his team, everyone’s attention would be on him and not on struggling teammates like Pekka Rinne.

How calculated was Subban? Well, he was actually waiting for the media in the Predators dressing room when the room was opened Saturday night, which is to say this was not an athlete flying off the handle in the heat of the moment but rather a guy who had carefully drafted a plan and was waiting for a chance to execute it.

We’ll find out soon enough if Subban and his guarantee live on in infamy — like Messier’s, Ali’s and Namath’s — or are long forgotten, like that horse that fizzled just as the finish line came into sight.

All I’m willing to guarantee is that whatever happens in downtown Winnipeg Monday night, PK Subban is sure to be in the middle of it.

email: paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @PaulWiecek