Vancouver Canucks defenseman Mattias Ohlund vs. Calgary Flames right winger Jarome Iginla. Shutdown defender vs. star goal-scorer.
And through the first three games of the Canucks-Flames first-round series, it was a classic battle. A matchup made in heaven.
"We have a lot of respect for each other," the soft-spoken Ohlund said. "It seems like we've battled one another since we were juniors and Sweden played Canada. He's certainly got a lot of speed and muscle and skill. Just a classic power forward.
"A player like that doesn't take no for an answer if you try to take time and space away from him while he's trying to provide offense for his team."
And at 28, Ohlund is a defensemen who is sometimes overlooked because of the presence of a more flamboyant Ed Jovanovski on the Vancouver defense. Mattias is this steady and skilled player, not generally considered a warrior ... but he is one nonetheless.
He looks lighter than the 220 pounds of muscle he carries. His skill with the puck make some think he can't be the classic neutralizer that coach Marc Crawford is asking him to be.
A silky smooth defender, Ohlund played all 82 games this season. He had a career-high 14 goals. But he also had a career-best plus 14. In fact, some West of Detroit might say he was the best Swedish defenseman in the NHL this season. A Norris Trophy candidate, with the Red Wings Nicklas Lidstrom struggling to find his game.
"I'm at my best when I play physical ... hard ... focused," Ohlund said quietly.
"He's just a horse back there," said teammate Trevor Linden. "You look at the kind of minutes he logs and the kind of players he plays against every night and that's his matchup. He's the kind of guy you don't measure by numbers."
Still, you have to look at the numbers.
And in the first three games of this duel, Iginla, who tied for the NHL goal-scoring lead with 41 goals this season and had 52, 35, 41 the last three seasons, had just one goal. Ohlund's Canucks had two wins.
"I think sometimes Matty goes unnoticed around the NHL," St. Louis Blues defenseman Murray Baron, who played in Vancouver the past five seasons, told me last week. "It's probably like Nicklas Lidstrom in Detroit. You play against him two, three, five or six times a year and say, ?Yeah, he's pretty good, ...
"But you don't really appreciate all of the little things he does every night, every shift. Things that make a push a player into that elite category of defensemen. I saw that every night with Matty. Maybe this matchup against Iginla with show others just how good he really is."
For the 6-foot-2 Ohlund, life in the NHL has been a battle. Until four years ago, he was seeing the NHL through a foggy lens in his right eye -- the result of an injury when a puck defected into his face in a preseason game against the Ottawa Senators in Sept. 21, 1999.
"I missed three months that season and had to have, I guess, six more surgeries after that over a few years before my eyesight was restored," Ohlund recalled for me earlier this season. "My career? It was a blink away from being over."
He missed three months of the 1999-2000 season with the injury and his career since encompasses seasons of missed time for one new procedure after another. Potholes in a career that was so promising when the Canucks selected Ohlund 13th overall in the first round of the 1994 draft -- and he was developing into one of the NHL's brightest young defensive prospects in the game before the injury. In a game where fitness and strength have become more and more important, the surgeries prohibited Ohlund from doing the kind of training a first-rate defenseman in the NHL has to do.
"I was scared when I returned to the ice," he recalled. "It took me a while to regain my confidence. But the mental part of one-on-one competition was took still longer. Think about it: It was so fast. One second and it could have all been over. For years, doctors told me I might never have more than 70 percent of my sight. I'm lucky to still be playing. It's scary when it's your eyes. But going through that ordeal had helped me appreciate the game and what I have in my life even more."
But, even after several operations and laser treatments to repair the damage and relieve the pressure buildup behind the cornea, Ohlund, who thought the eye woes were behind him -- that his sight had returned to normal -- was bugged once again in January of 2002, when his pre-Olympic drug test got him banned because of some eye medication, acetazolmide, he was still taking.
After harsh words from the Swedish Olympic Organization and the NHL, he was pardoned and life did return to normal. But his play is far more than normal.
"The doctors don't know if I'm going to have any more problems in five years or 10 years or ever again," Ohlund said, smiling. "Right now, everything looks pretty good."
Ohlund is one of those players who had life spinning out of control in front of him -- great career ahead of him, son, Viktor, just born, and hockey career rising in front of our very eyes.
Then, Boom! Darkness ... and uncertainty.
"It's definitely been a roller-coaster ride for a lot of those years," Ohlund told me. "But I think we are all stronger because of it. I've got a lovely wife (Joanne), two kids (Viktor and Hannah) and I can look ahead to better things. Yes, things are looking pretty good."
Even a matchup against perhaps the game's most explosive power forward and all of the physical abuse that it brings cannot deter the resolve that Mattias Ohlund has built up through the years.
Most underrated player in the game? He might have been ... before this classic matchup. But not any more.
Mattias Ohlund is this steady and skilled player, not generally considered a warrior ... but he is one nonetheless.
