Saturday, March 26, 2011

Tigers Defeat Wheaties 5-2

A better game by the whole team. Surprisingly Tyler Bunz was scratched tonight, out with an injury. I believe the Tigers expect him back for the next game.

First Period
The Tigers came out of the gate on fire. They kept wheat kings in their own end for the first 5 minutes of the game, and outshot them 6-0.

Thomas Carr would receive a nice pass in the slot area but rang iron. Sebastien Owooooyeah would work the arena crowd into a frenzy as he scored his first goal as a Tiger with a perfectly placed wrist shot in the lower right hand corner.

Kale Kessey would make a sneaky hit on a Brandon Defender. As the wheat King defender went around the back of the net Kessy cut across the net to meet him head on the other way. At the last second the Brandon player saw Kessey coming and turned around right as Kessy Laid into him. The Wheat King player then dropped to the ice and it looked like he was initially hurt pretty bad, but would get up and smirk at Kessy as Kessey was given a 4 minute penalty from checking from behind. Yeah it was a penalty but the ref bought the reaction and gave Kessey and extra 2 minutes.

Brandon took advantage early As Brandon jammed the net on the powerplay and stuffed a goal past Devan Dubyk. The ref initially didn't call a goal but after a review upstairs they deemed is was a good goal.

By the end of the first period the Tigers were on their heels. Brandon had turned around the momentum and outshot the Tigers 16-9. Devan Dubyk was playing very sharp. 1-1 Tie Game

Second Period
Finally the Tigers put together a team effort and started playing hockey like we expect them to. The Tigers would get goals From Dylan Bredo and Boston Leier. They would take a 3-1 lead into the third period. I thought the second period by far was their best period of playoff hockey.

Third Period
Two Tigers would crash into each other giving Brandon some room to work with the puck and Scott Glennie would score his second of the game. 3-2 Tigers.

Cole Grbavac would score an insurance goal, and Linden Vey cemented the empty netter to make it a 5-2 win.

Brandon had quite a bit of pressure in the Tigers zone, Including 2 power-plays in the first ten minutes of the third. Devan Dubyk would stand tall and stopped a variety of tricky shots in close.

Overall
A much better overall effort. Although I wasn't impressed with how many times the Tigers failed to get the puck out of their zone. They had quite a few situations where Tigers would fail to get the puck out 4-5-6 times in a row, and it gave Brandon a whole lot more opportunities to generate offense.

I thought Deven Dubyk played very good in net, he was seeing the puck real well. I thought Linden Vey despite scoring in back to back games hasn't performed to his capability However, Emerson Etem and Curtiz Valk both stepped up their games. I have
been very impressed with Valk so far during these first two games, and guys like Bredo, Mackay, Leier played very well.

I thought Owuya played well tonight. He was physical and stepped up a couple times making solid smart hits. I didn't like Kellan Tochkin or Jace Coyle's game, the floaters have returned to old habbits.

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