Langkow Hopes To Take Tri-City On Playoff Ride

The Tri-City Americans have never stepped beyond the first round of the Western Hockey League playoffs.

Daymond Langkow is beginning to take the plight of the 7-year-old franchise personally.

With his team reeling from a 9-5 Friday night loss in Spokane in the playoff opener, Langkow on Sunday night lifted the Americans to a 5-3 home-ice win over Tacoma.

Initially listed as having scored two goals , Langkow - the WHL West Division Player of the Year - was eventually credited with a third.

It was the first playoff hat trick for the younger brother of Portland Winter Hawks goalkeeper Scott Langkow, and the latest sign that if Tri-City folds it up early again, Daymond Langkow won’t go quietly.

Langkow and the Americans meet the Spokane Chiefs on Thursday night in Kennewick, the 16th and most important meeting between the two.

Chiefs fans have already seen and heard too much of Langkow, an 18-year-old center from Vegreville, Alberta, who’s projected among the first five picks of the midsummer National Hockey League draft.

Of the 140 points (67 goals, 73 assists) Langkow put up this year, 24 came against Spokane.

He wrapped up the WHL scoring championship on March 18 with his typical response to a challenge.

Skating along scoreless for two periods against Portland, Langkow exploded in the final 20 minutes, assisting on five goals. Darcy Tucker of Kamloops had to settle for second.

It was a sweet ending to some bitterness over the selection process for Team Canada, the goldmedal winning team in last January’s World Junior Tournament.

Langkow didn’t get much of a look from Team Canada coach Don Hay. Tucker - Hay’s star in Kamloops - was selected.

Tucker also starred on the team that went unbeaten through the tournament, but Langkow felt the slight of oversight.

“After not getting picked he didn’t pout,” Randy Langkow said. “He went out and did something about it on the ice. I was proud of him for that.”

Langkow’s vision and instincts are second to none in the WHL, Chiefs coach Mike Babcock said.

“He does things you don’t coach, but what I really like about him is how hard he works. There’s no one in the league who’s as good at making the people around him better,” Babcock said.

His shot, Spokane goaltender Jarrod Daniel said, is the most accurate in the league. Nobody puts the puck on net as well or as often.

“He can slow it down or pick it up,” Babcock said, “and he can play forever. They play him three and four minutes a shift. He can fly but everything with him is timing and being in the right place. He paces himself and goes hard at the right times.

“He’s the most dominant player in the league, in my book.”

Langkow doesn’t dismiss lightly the value - even among the talented shooters - of a little luck with the puck.

“If you have time to aim - on a 2-on-1 for example - a lot of times you can pick a spot and it goes in,” Langkow said. “But other times you don’t have time to look. You just shoot. Then luck has a lot to do with it.

“Slide it to the net and hope something happens. If you get a lot of shots some are bound to go in.”

In the goes-around-comes-around world of hockey, Langkow was a linemate of Spokane’s Jason Podollan in bantam hockey in the Edmonton suburb of Sherwood Park.

“Daymond was his playmaker,” Langkow’s mother, Vivian, said. “Jason Podollan, Daymond and (Mike) Dubinsky (of the Brandon Wheat Kings) played together. Podollan. That boy can score goals.”

Five years later Podollan and Langkow are leading scorers on WHL rivals.

“That was a great bantam team,” Langkow’s father, Randy, said. “I think they lost two games all year. They had 14 players go on to play in the WHL.”

Blair Manning of Seattle, Nolan Pratt and Brad Symes of Portland and Mark Hurley - Langkow’s teammate in Tri-City - were on that Sherwood Park club, Randy Langkow said.

Langkow and Zenith Komarniski, another of Langkow’s teammates in Tri-City, go back even earlier.

“Zenith’s dad Lawrence coached Daymond in minor hockey (novice, atom and peewee age groups)” Randy Langkow said. “We’d trade. One year I’d coach, the next he would take over.”

Lankgow was 10 when his father began to see something special.

“I tried not to say too much but deep down I thought this competitiveness was going to take him somewhere,” Randy Langkow said. “It was the look in his eyes when he played, how important it was to him. It wasn’t necessary to score seven or eight points a game.

“Winning was first. Second was not having a goal scored against him. When he was 4 he was in a game when the other team scored.

“He cried.”

Langkow’s style - put as much into defense as goal-scoring - is rooted in his youth.

“He knew he wasn’t going to get five bucks from us for every goal, like some parents handed out,” Vivian Langkow said. “He never worried about the points.”The kid who never worried about points now scores on good nights almost at will.

The Chiefs’ plan is to limit his opportunity.

“You’re not going to stop him completely,” Babcock said. “You try to eliminate his opportunity to hurt you, and hope he doesn’t put on one of those clinics that he can do.”

Langkow has had a long season to formulate a plan for Spokane.

“After playing Daniel so many times I’ve noticed that if you don’t beat him early he gets tougher as the game goes on,” Langkow said. “We have to jump on him early.

“He comes out really far (away from the net),” Langkow added. “If you can pump fake and pull it to the side you have a better chance of putting it in against him. That’s what we talk about anyway.”

The consensus around the league is that the Americans are average at best when Langkow’s line, with 50-goal scorer Terry Ryan on the left wing, is off the ice.

Three dot data …

The Red Deer Rebels and coach Peter Anholt have parted company. Anholt is the only head coach the Rebels have had since their expansion year of 1992-93 … The Chiefs finished fifth in the WHL in attendance, behind Portland, Kamloops, Saskatoon and Tacoma … With the SuperSonics taking over the Tacoma Dome, Rockets attendance was down 14,113 from last year … Portland is making waves in its playoff pool, thanks in part to veteran Layne Roland, who’s playing pretty well for a guy who’s out for the year. When Roland broke his right thumb he was announced as out for the season. He did sit out eight games but was a surprise playoff starter. Roland had a goal and an assist in Portland’s 3-2 upset at Seattle …Turning it up in the playoffs: Spokane defenseman John Shockey , who had only seven points in 42 regular-season games, has a goal and three assists in two playoff games. Jay Bertsch, who was limited to five goals in 47 games before the playoffs, has struck for three goals in two games of the Chiefs’ second season.