The Fort Frances Jr. Sabres went 0-3 on a road trip over the weekend, losing a pair of games to the Schreiber Diesels by 7-5 scores before falling 3-2 in overtime to the Thunder Bay Bearcats.
Sunday’s loss in Thunder Bay marked the Sabres’ sixth in a row—and their eighth game without a win. The road trip garnered them just one point.
“We had a goal going into the weekend to achieve four points,” Sabres’ head coach Wayne Strachan said. “You know, I guess what it comes down to is the same errors we’ve been making all year.
“We’re in both games and competing against Schreiber, losing both 7-5 with both empty-net goals.”
Sabres’ captain Quinn Amiel couldn’t hide the sting he still felt from the trio of losses.
“Oooh . . . well, it wasn’t good,” he said. “But in our second game [on Saturday], we finished the game with six forwards and four defencemen.
“And it was a lot of key guys that went down, too.”
He pointed to injuries to Kyle Turgeon and Shawn Fulton that decimated the team’s second line and hampered their scoring and depth.
“Yeah, it was bad, but we can’t drown in the negatives,” Amiel reasoned.
Things didn’t improve in Sunday’s game versus the Bearcats as Emo native Luke Judson scored both the first goal and last goals of the game.
The Sabres held a 2-1 lead after the second period, but spent much of the third on the penalty kill and then gave up a power-play goal in overtime.
“Just a broken record. It’s penalties that kill us all the time,” Amiel said.
Veteran winger Colin Spencer, who broke out of a scoring slump with his first two goals of the season over the weekend, said Sunday’s loss was due to the Sabres “not capitalizing on our chances.”
“Kind of didn’t have that killer instinct to finish them off.”
The team’s injury situation did extend past Saturday night. Strachan said a bout of mononucleosis is making its way through part of the team, and Ray Pressacco and Dustin Johnson are out with head and leg injuries, respectively.
Strachan seemed to take the team’s health as just part of playing a junior season.
“I guess it’s an adversity thing we gotta fight through, and hopefully once everyone’s healthy and we keep working on our systems and whatnot, by March 10 when the season ends, we’ll be in fourth place.
“That’s our goal.”
And to make that goal with a depleted corps and the trade deadline looming Dec. 1, Strachan changed the look of the roster by releasing recently-added forward Dan Usiski and putting defenceman MacKenzie York’s name out over the trade wire.
Strachan said Usiski would benefit from some playing time at the high school level in Baudette, but the decision to move York off the team means the loss of a blueline regular and one of the Sabres’ first-ever signings.
York’s offensive contributions have cooled since the early part of the season, and Strachan admitted the 20-year-old Edmonton native’s age and import status factored into the move.
The coach/general manager added if York was not moved by the trade deadline, he likely would be released outright.
“Unfortunately, it’s the business of hockey,” Spencer said of the roster changes. “I’ve been there. I’ve been there a few times. . . .
“It’s always hard to see that . . . [but] being in the league for three or four years, you learn to expect it.”
“You’ve gotta bond with the players, but you can’t get so close that you get heartbroken and can’t play,” Amiel said, adding he was cut by his team halfway through his first year in junior hockey.
The Sabres are stuck in sixth place in the SIJHL—two points back of the Marathon Renegades. While no team plans to lose, Strachan said being kept off the win column for eight-straight games isn’t a crisis for an expansion team.
“You talk to Marathon,” Strachan said of last year’s expansion team. “They won five games and to talk to their general manager [Donald Savoie], he says they can’t believe how competitive we are at this point in the season.”
He also points to the age of the team, which only will see four players too old to play next season.
“I guess maybe if you look at the standings, people would say, ‘Oh, they don’t look that good,’ but I don’t think we’re that bad,” Strachan stressed. “If you look at our roster, we’re mainly an ’89-based team.
“We got a lot of 18-year-old kids and we are looking for the future.”
The captain, however, is only looking at the immediate future—this weekend’s two games against the host Thunder Bay Bulldogs. With the Bulldogs the only team behind the Sabres, there’s only one thing Fort Frances is looking for.
“Two wins. That’s all. We can’t think of anything else. We need two wins, and we need them in a big way,” Amiel stressed. “I know it’s been said a lot, but this has to be the turning point right here.”
Fort Frances Times
Local News from Across the Rainy River District
