PHILADELPHIA -- Flyers like Mike Richards and Kimmo Timonen say they need to triple their hits tonight, and that's certainly fine with Patrick Kaleta. The Angola native was all smiles after the Sabres' morning skate today in the Wells Fargo Center when the talk turned to how tough Game Five might become.
"It's part of being a competitor: Hate the person and hate the team you're going against," Kaleta said. "That's also the fun part too. You play the same team over and over again and it's a battle. On the ice, it's all-out war and that's what you have to do."
Kaleta said he also loved Lindy Ruff's cracks on the Flyers yesterday.
"Lindy's behind our backs 100 percent," he said. "That's why personally, and I can vouch for everyone in the room that we love playing for Lindy, that he'll have our backs 100 percent of the way and that's what you need, a sense of team where everyone is in it together. He's kind of funny sometimes and that's the way he is."
There's also a bizarre Zapruder film moment to the series that Kaleta is in the middle of.
Midway through the third period of Game Four, Cody McCormick and Nikolay Zherdev were engaged in front of the Buffalo bench and a clip from CSN Philly appears to show Kaleta opening the door to the bench so that Zherdev falls in. The clip made Deadspin.com -- the site that made Brett Favre and Jenn Sterger famous -- under the headline "This Might be the Dirtiest Hockey Play We've Seen in a While"
See for yourself.
"There was a change. You pop it open and slide down," Kaleta said. "I didn't expect anyone to be in our bench but it was kind of funny. Just because I did it, people think I did it on purpose but I was there and flipped it up and whatever. They were scrumming but you never expect anybody to be there. You're on a change, you pop it open and slide down and let the player come in. It's what you do. You do it so many times you kind of take it for granted."
Uh-huh.
Hear Kaleta's session with reporters below.
---Mike Harrington
(www.twitter.com/bnharrington)
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