Goalie Cam Ward was the biggest star Wednesday as Athens completed an unlikely comeback to knock Berlin out of the playoffs. The Greeks have advanced to play defending Cup champion Paris for the Southern Conference title.
The Smurfs seemed to have the series in hand when they were up 3-0 and Athens had three forwards injured. But they couldn’t put the Greeks away. Athens won the next four games, scoring 4 goals twice, 5 in another game and 6 in Game 6. In Game 7 in Germany, both teams started out tentative. Berlin only got 3 shots on Ward in the first period. Greek native Dimitrios Kalyvas played a big part in the win Wednesday. When Nathan Horton of Berlin got called for slashing, Kalyvas had an assist on Lubomir Visnovsky’s powerplay goal just 4 minutes into the contest. Then a little more than a minute later, Kalyvas made a quick little pass from below the goal line and T.J. Oshie capitalized by jamming it past Berlin netminder Jimmy Howard. In the second period, Berlin came out blazing, but Ward would have none of it. He saved about 15 shots to keep it 2-0 and then disaster struck for the Smurfs with 1:32 remaining in the period when Kalyvas passed to Ryan O’Reilly, who fired a blistering wrist shot past Howard to make it 3-0. Kalyvas now has 11 points in 12 playoff games. He scored 70 points during the regular season. Not long after O’Reilly’s goal, Berlin countered with Patric Hornqvist’s first goal of the playoffs and the teams went into the third period with Athens ahead by a pair. The third period was a wild one, played mainly 5-on-5 with the teams combining for 29 shots, but none of Berlin’s 13 that period fooled Ward. The Athens goalie ended with 32 saves and was probably the difference in the game. Trivia: Both goalies in Wednesday’s games were acquired in trades and both on trades that occurred on Dec. 18 (WSH time). On Dec. 18 of Season 2, Athens traded Mikka Kiprusoff and Michal Neuvirth to Stockholm for Ward. On Dec. 18 of Season 3, Oslo traded Howard to Berlin in exchange for Semyon Varlamov and Jarko Immonen.
