For those of you who have forgotten your college literature class, Samuel Beckett wrote a classic play, Waiting for Godot, in which the two main characters live out a boring day waiting for, you guessed it, someone called Godot. This man is guaranteed to come, sometime later. Today, he doesn’t.

The next day dawns, and with it the hopes of Didi and Gogo, again condemned to wait. They pass the time playing with their shoes, considering hanging themselves, and trying to figure out why they’re there. But they know one thing—they’re waiting for Godot.

In other words, they’re a lot like Kings fans, except instead of Godot, these die-hards are Waiting for Goalie. And every time they get a glimmer that maybe the savior has come, they get on their Sunday best and invite him in to dinner, all smiles. The love fest never lasts long.

This week, Goalie is Erik Ersberg, a Swede who is twenty-six and played two years in the Swedish Elite League before being signed by the Kings organization in 2007. His play with team HV 71 in Sweden yielded him the Elitserien Honken Trophy in 2006-07 as the Goalie of the Year. Last season with the Kings and Manchester, he saw action in thirty AHL games, winning ten and losing thirteen and posting a 2.92 GAA and .897 save percentage.

Near the end of the 2007-08 season, he was called up to the parent club and found his way into fourteen games, with a 6-5-3 record, a 2.48 GAA and .927 save percentage. Those numbers were the best among all Kings goalies last year. He also had two shutouts.

So why hasn’t he been top of mind for Kings supporters before now? Because the future, at least the immediate one, belonged to Jason LaBarbera, who came to camp lean and ready to go. He started the team’s first ten games of the year, winning three and losing five with one OT loss and one shootout loss. Along the way, he got a shutout, October 24th against St. Louis in Missouri, and had a 3.01 GAA and .884 save percentage.

Not great numbers, and when he lost two games in a row and gave up five goals in the second of those, Coach Terry Murray decided to go the other way, and start the Swede.

Not a big guy, in person Ersberg seems positively a youngster. Looking at his face, you’d mistake him for seventeen. And looking at his physique, he also strikes you as more kid than grown up. He’s listed at 6’0” and 168 pounds, and he looks every bit of 150.

Ersberg’s slight size doesn’t mean he plays like a kid, however. His mobility is good, and his style, while honed in the European tradition, almost looks throwback in a way. That is, he’s not big enough just to go down on every shot and count on his equipment to make the save for him. Instead, he has to move, and watching him play, you think of some kind of a cross between a nervous terrier and a flea. None of that is meant at all as a criticism. Rather, he is throwback in the sense that he plays an athletic game, not a purely technical. And as long as that works, it’s a lot more fun to watch than a Michelin Man on his knees letting his enormous pads do his job for him, for my money.

Because of his size, he says, he is working on a few skills to hone his game for the NHL. He told Inside Hockey the other night after his win against the Blues, “I’m not a very big guy, so I have to try to come out and challenge the shooters, and I try to make myself big even if I’m not really big. I try to move around so that I’m in the right spot all the time, when they move the puck around.”

If you want to test my throwback theory, get a hold of a DVD copy of the 1974 series between the WHA all-stars and the Russian team. Watch Gerry Cheevers, and count the number of athletic plays he makes. Look at how he moves, then watch Ersberg play. You’ll see what I mean. Of course, you’ll have to allow also that, like any modern goalie, Ersberg is much more covered up, and wears a much better mask, than Cheevers might ever have dreamed of.

When I asked him about his style, which is mobile and seems to favor his glove hand, Ersberg replied, “I think that started to develop when I came over here. In Sweden, I was more on my knees. I can’t speak for everyone else, but it’s a faster game [the NHL], and I need to stay on my feet a little more. I try to read the shot and go down if I have to.”

“There are better shooters here, too. They can hit the corners,” he said. The other difference he notes is that “the ice is smaller here, so you get more shots from everywhere.” But on the other hand, “Everything gets pushed in, so more players here take responsibility for blocking shots. With the new rules you can’t really muscle anybody out in front of he net, so you have to block shots.” Add that up, and it at first seems like a contradiction, but in the end says something like, “I’m new here, and I’m still adjusting to the game as it’s played in the NHL.”

And what he’s doing works. He may just be on a hot streak, but this last week or so he has been 3-0-1. Coming into Tuesday night, he had made five starts, with a 2-1-1 record and a .904 save percentage. That third win came in a shootout against Dallas.

When asked after the game how he felt about the shootout win, he said, “I don’t feel too much pressure at all. It’s just a fun thing, and I try to enjoy it.” He says he feels good at playing a number of games in a row, and reports that his parents back home watch the games in the morning after recording them off the internet.

But back to that shootout. Could it really be that he is unaffected by the situation? The thing came down to the fifth round, tied 1-1, and then with the Kings ahead 2-1 after scoring on their fifth try, going first. Ersberg set to face Mike Modano, and he did a full splits and stabbed out his glove hand to deflect the puck away for the win.

“I had seen him go high glove before, so I kind of put it all in on my glove there, and fortunately he shot it there.” He said it made up for the goal just earlier by Mike Ribeiro, where he had been forced all the way into the corner of his net while the puck was dribbled into the other side.

He describes his method by saying, “I try to match their speed coming in, go out and challenge them, force them to make the first move and then I can react to that.” All of this is said with the calmest demeanor, as if the game he’s talking about were a high school badminton tournament.

So Ersberg is winning, and doing it in style. What’s the downside? One odd thing about the guy is that, in almost every game, he lets in at least one goal which he just doesn’t react to. So far, these haven’t been particularly bad goals, and maybe it’s just been a fluke that this has happened in consecutive games. Against Florida last week, Ersberg saw just 15 shots, and the line of questioning after the game was about what you’d expect.

“Is it hard to keep your head in the game when you’re not getting that much work?”

“If they have zero shots the whole game, then I’m guaranteed to get a shutout, so that’s what you want. But I just have to be ready for whatever comes to me. But it’s tough to get your rhythm going when you have one shot and then you have to wait five or seven minutes. I mean, sometimes you just face too few shots, and you let in a bad one, and you can’t be thinking about that.”

On the other hand, he admits it when he makes a mistake. For instance, he said about the Florida game, “I guess it was closer than it had to be. The first goal was a bad goal by me.” And of the third one, which he seemed to let roll along his body and in, and which Coach Murray afterwards said probably would have gone wide had Ersberg just let it go, “It deflected up and on myself and in; I had control of it. I’ve gotta stop that shot.”

But as long as he stops enough pucks to keep his gang in the game, none of that really matters, though if there’s one other area of his game that Ersberg should work on, it’s his read of the game. He is often very slow to react to a delayed penalty on the other team. He rarely gets out of the net in time for the Kings to get the extra man on.

The question is, is he Goalie, or Godot? Goalie, when he comes, will change the LA franchise from perennial wannabe to potential contender. He’ll do what so many, from Cechmanek to Cloutier, could not do. At this point, fans think that he may be named Zatkoff, or Bernier, or Quick. Some, however, are starting to ask themselves whether he might be named Ersberg.

Ersberg himself says, “It’s always nice to play a lot of games. That what every goalie wants.” And one would think that, as long as he’s winning, and maybe even if he loses one or two, he’ll stay in the cage. His coach, who has redirected all attempts to find out who would start in goal next after every game this season, was slightly more direct than usual after Dallas. “Uh, Ersberg, well, he played well. To do what he did in the shootout is good stuff. You’ve got to get some stops against the best shooters in the game in those situations, and he’s coming up pretty large for us.”

You can bet that means the Swede is going to be in the net next game, a single-game road trip to Dallas Thursday.

And as for Godot? Well, stop reading now if you’re planning on rereading the play anytime soon. What happened to Godot is that he didn’t come the second day of the play, either. As the action ends, the implication is, he never will.

Brian Kennedy holds a PhD in contemporary literature, so he really is qualified to talk about Beckett. About goalies, well, you be the judge.

Notes

Oscar Moller was scratched with the flu against Dallas. Brad Richardson and John Zeiler were healthy scratches. In for Moller was Derek Armstrong. Coach Murray said after the game that Moller would be back in the lineup Thursday against Dallas in Texas.

Kyle Quincey, picked up on waivers from Detroit October 13th, is logging more ice time than any other Kings player, something close to twenty-three minutes a contest. Coach Murray attributed the team’s getting him to “advanced scouting—I’d never heard of him before, but our guys saw him play in Detroit, and they let us know what a talent he is.”