Milan Lucic: A portrait of the old goon as a spry playmaker

It would seem his days as the battering ram who hulks and sulks, the ox who plods down the ice and plows into back-checkers, that icebreaker barge who can split a skull but never splits the D, are over. Or at least expanded in their scope a bit.

Milan Lucic logs minutes every night because of his size. Folks expect him to forecheck, hit, bellow, battle, and scrap at a moment’s notice. No clause in his contract compels him to stain the twine black with goals, notch an assist every night. Lucic has built himself a lifelong brand around crowding the crease and crashing into corners, not cramming the scoresheet.

But under his booming physique there lays some potent offensive awareness. One 30-goal season and five 50+ point showings throughout his career attest to that. Lucic, though he rarely shows it, can execute creative, lucrative plays in the offensive zone.

A combination of his age and usage during this regular season hid it well, but these playoffs have nurtured a resurgence. The five-game point-streak says it all—Lucic is producing at his fastest clip in years.

But even beyond their quantity, his points have impressed via their quality. Rather than scooping up sporadic second assists from rebounds and ricochets, Lucic is creating these scoring situations with his own stick. Not with his shoulders—though his physical play has been stellar, too—but with his stick. Milan Lucic connecting highlight-reel passes? An absurd notion some months ago. But his assists so far these playoffs—and three of them in particular—have been pretty, perceptive, and poised.

Credit the pause, his relationship with Geoff Ward, the energy embodied by linemate Dillon Dube, inspiration as a veteran leader on the team, whatever spins your tires—as proven by the following three assists, Milan Lucic has escaped his niche, unveiled his offensive vision, and harnessed a long-untapped reserve of flair and finesse with the puck so far these playoffs.

“Chef’s kiss,” amirite kids? Dube absorbs a cross-check yet manages to swat the puck to Lucic and the big man swings a sweet no-look behind-the-back pass to Andrew Mangiapane. The latter feeds Mikael Backlund in the slot, and victory cemented.

As flashy a second assist as they come—Lucic flaunts some flawless intuition there. As he monitors Dube’s battle, he engraves the peripheral image of Mangiapane hovering in his mind. So, when the puck squeaks out to his tape, Lucic immediately flips the puck to his backhand to widen the gap and zap a pass over to Mangiapane. And he takes a cross-check himself to boot. Lucic seamlessly juggled the locations of Dube, Mangiapane, and the Jets defencemen charging at him all at once so he could detect and deliver to the unseen man. Pretty, hey?

Perhaps the single blipping positive on a radar screen awash with negatives that night was Lucic’s hyper-aware tap-pass to Sam Bennett on the Flames’ second goal. It winks by quickly, but Lucic ushers an unfavourable rebound directly onto the swooping blade of his isolated centreman.

Now the finish was clumsy, a goal of infinite fluke, but the assist from Lucic was expertly calculated. He follows Bennett into the zone, opens up for a pass, lowers his blade once he sees Bennett fire. But Lucic always senses Bennett whirring along the boards to his left. So when the rebound squirts out a bit beyond Lucic in a way that forces him to reach his stick too far, he feels no need to whack a clunky puck towards the net. The man is nestled in the slot, the puck finds his tape, but he has the split-second offensive judgement not to shoot from an awkward position. He recalls Bennett instead and computes a quick transfer to the faster, unmarked man. So perceptive.

And his magnum opus. With the fast-twitch reflexes of an Olympic sprinter (an absolutely ridiculous analogy when describing Lucic, conceded, but this play warrants heavy praise) he receives the sweep from Backlund and rockets the puck across the rink to a trailing Dube in one touch. One. Touch.

Plenty to unpack here, but the Sportsnet broadcast itself provided a strong foundation. As per an eminently cool onscreen infographic, the puck lingered on Lucic’s blade for a total of 0.08 seconds between grasping the pass and launching a straight missile back to Dube. That time interval? According to Google, 200 milliseconds faster than the average human blink.

What allows Lucic to fling the pass with such rapid-fire confidence is an acute awareness of the open passing lanes. For one, Lucic stares down Dube the entire time he receives the initial feed from Backlund. He glances, registers, and hones his sights. In that second though he also sees the empty space afforded him by an advancing Backlund (thus pressing back the defencemen), recognizing that he can laser a pass to Dube without any interfering skates or sticks in the way so long as he passes behind Backlund. All that challenges a perfect connection is an outstretched stick from one of the defenders, but as the Sportsnet broadcast broke down, Backlund immediately lunges forwards and lifts the stick that tries to intercept the feed. So Lucic simultaneously spots Dube, processes Backlund’s effort to clear the lane, plots the pass trajectory and caps it with a beautiful feed in a timespan shorter than a blink. Poised as hell.

Pretty, perceptive, poised. Previously unsuitable adjectives to describe how Milan Lucic plays hockey that now skim the mere surface of his contributions to the Flames’ playoff success. Nobody could accuse Lucic of simply barreling into bodies anymore—it is his greatest strength, sure, but not his only trick. His blade can blaze, too. And in the round where everyone must hurdle their comfort zone and optimize every aspect of their game? As for Lucic, at least, his passes have never been crisper.