Another article giving some love to Ohlund

And because we love Mattias Ohlund around here, here's an article WOOTing Ohlie from Tony Gallagher:

All-round fine effort by prime-time Ohlund
April 20, 2009

ST. LOUIS — With 34 seconds remaining in the game here Sunday night, Mattias Ohlund made his only mistake of the evening when he put too much mustard on a clearing effort and iced the puck.

Everything else, pretty much gold. And while some say he’s slipped a little bit as he’s gotten older, he hasn’t slipped far if you watched him closely while the Vancouver Canucks were taking a guzzle hold on this series.

“What can you say?” said Sami Salo about Ohlund with a smile. “Big on penalty kill, big minutes, big-time player. That’s what it’s all about.”

In typical Ohlund fashion, he played down every aspect of his performance, which saw him take over for the normal lion on the kill, Willie Mitchell, on the left side of both two- man disadvantages — evidently the officials feeling such situations are acceptable as a way of getting the Blues into this series.

But with Ohlund looking every bit in his prime since the playoffs started, it just wasn’t happening for St. Louis, the big Swede blasting pucks around the boards, blocking shots, slipping little backhand clearing passes up the middle and generally making life more bearable for Roberto Luongo, who normally would have been trying to catch bullets in his teeth in such a situation.

“If you analyze why we’re taking all these penalties, I don’t really know what it is — whether we’re not moving our feet or what — but killing them off is a big part of the playoffs and with Willie our main PK guy, I had a little more work on that than normal. But I’ve felt pretty good most of the year and tonight we got it done on the kill.”

Ohlund managed to chip in the Canucks’ first goal on the power play, as well, although he was feeling like the goalie in the commercial who has the horseshoes drop out of his shorts afterwards.

“It was lucky, I mean I hardly hit the puck at all and it just kept going,” said the big Swede, who would love to stay with Vancouver next season but may be worth more than the Canucks can afford, given all the emerging talent that needs to fit under the umbrella.

Salo talked about how important it is to win faceoffs and pointed to Ryan Johnson’s great night on the draw, but after the win on those shorthanded situations the defenceman’s response to possession is crucial. Ohlund was at his best, coolly picking spots and hammering pucks out, getting far more ginger on those pucks than he did on the seeing-eye goal, all of which he’ll take, thank you.

“I’ve never felt we’ve done enough in playoffs here in Vancouver on the teams I’ve been on and that’s something we’d all like to change,” he said.

They appear to have set off in the right direction, and Ohlund is one of men leading the way.

Damn straight!