Allen loses skate blade in Montreal, gets quick repair

MONTREAL - Jake Allen thought he had seen it all in 15 years of being a goaltender.
As it turns out, he hadn't.
Midway through the second period of
Tuesday's 4-3 win against the Montreal Canadiens
, Allen made a quick left-pad stop on Max Pacioretty to preserve the Blues' 3-1 lead. When he tried to stand back up, he fell and discovered that his right skate blade had completely fallen off.

"I've never had that happen in my life," Allen said. "I made a left save with my pad and I looked down and my right skate was broken… I don't know what happened."
Allen skated on one leg - with help from his teammates - to the bench, where Blues Equipment Manager Joel Farnsworth explained that he would have to correct the problem in the locker room.
"There's a single bolt with a locknut on the back of it. The nut stripped out and came apart, and when he pushed off the post, the blade came flying out," Farnsworth said. "The nut was somewhere in a snowbank inside the net, so we didn't have a replacement nut immediately. We had to go get one."
It was a simple fix, but it was the first time Farnsworth had personally experienced this issue in-game during his 15-year, 1,200-plus-game career as an equipment manager.

Once in the locker room, Allen had to remove his right pad and then his skate, and that's when Farnsworth went to work. Allen didn't want to wait for the repair, so he started lacing up an old skate as a replacement and was fully suited back up and on his way to the ice just as Farnsworth was finishing the repair.
Allen missed just three minutes and 27 seconds of playing time - Carter Hutton didn't face a shot in his absence - before returning to the game. He played the rest of the second period wearing an old skate on his right foot.
"We handled it well," Blues Head Coach Mike Yeo said of the situation. "Guys did a good job… we did a really good job of getting into the offensive zone to give 'Hutts' a chance to find himself in there."
"I thought we played real solid, we played good as a group," Allen said of the win. "We buried our chances. We created a lot of o-zone time and wore them down. It was a good road win."