Joey Payeur
The Fort Frances Lakers were supplemented by their defence and goaltending this season, but their most telling characteristic was a high-powered offence that ran four lines deep.
When it came time to deliver at last week’s Dudley Hewitt Cup in Wellington, though, the new kings of the SIJHL found their seemingly bottomless well of goals virtually had run dry.
The Lakers were blanked 6-0 by the eventual tournament champion Toronto Lakeshore Patriots (OJHL) in Friday night’s semi-final, bringing an end to a campaign for a Fort Frances team once ranked as high as No. 2 in all of Canadian junior ‘A’ hockey but only able to score eight goals in four games—with six of those coming in one contest.
After pushing the Patriots in their round-robin clash last Tuesday afternoon before falling 4-1, Lakers’ head coach and general manager Wayne Strachan was not prepared for what unfolded in the first period of Friday’s semi-final as Fort Frances found itself trailing 4-0 after 20 minutes.
“Flat is the best word to describe the first period Friday,” Strachan confessed.
“As many games in the past two weeks when we needed a win or had our backs against the wall, we rose to the occasion and Friday, we came out flat and there’s no other way to describe it,” he remarked.
“We just were not in sync.
“As a coach, I can speculate on too many different things, but we didn’t have the jump and Toronto is too good of a team to give a break to,” Strachan stressed.
Niko Kovachis, who tied teammate Kevin Shier with a game-high three points, sandwiched even-strength goals at 3:31 and 18:01 around a power-play marker by Robert Powers at 11:35 and a short-handed tally by Nathan Feric at 15:45.
The end of the period also meant the end of the night for Lakers’ goalie Jordan Cartney, who had played every minute in the tourney up to that point and twice was named his team’s game MVP but departed after stopping only five of nine shots.
Devin Tappenden, who lost his starter’s job to Cartney in Game 5 of the SIJHL final, made 19 saves the rest of the way.
Shier made it 5-0 at 12:38 of the third before Tyler Currie added another man-advantage marker at 16:16.
Goalie Evan Buitenhuis did the rest with 26 saves to register the shutout.
The Lakers had finished the round-robin portion in third place out of the four teams with a 1-2 record.
But they looked to be gaining strength after a must-win 6-3 victory over the Kirkland Lake Gold Miners (NOJHL) on Thursday afternoon to earn a berth in the semi-final and send the Miners home with an 0-3 record.
But the catapult the Lakers got on ended up lobbing them straight into a Patriots’ wall.
“As a coach, you never want to see a lopsided score against your own team,” noted Strachan.
“Now that I look back, I thought we had some momentum, had a bunch of players rise up and meet the challenge of needing a win, and I truly believed if we played to our capability, we had a chance to play [in the final] on Saturday.
“To see at the end of the game 6-0 was disappointing and shocking,” he admitted.
The Lakers found themselves in a desperate situation against Kirkland Lake after dropping their opening game to the Patriots and then being whitewashed 3-0 by the host Wellington Dukes the following night.
“I am not so convinced it was what Wellington did or the lack of what we didn’t do,” Strachan said about the loss to the Dukes, who won the Dudley Hewitt Cup back in 2003 when the event was hosted in Fort Frances and claimed the title again in 2011.
“It was funny as I thought we played a much better game versus Wellington than our first game,” he remarked.
“But we did not attack the net or put pucks to the net like we were capable.
“Wellington adhered to its systems and played a tough defensive zone, but we didn’t penetrate the front of their net enough,” Strachan added.
It was a more familiar Lakers’ team against Kirkland Lake, though, as Fort Frances went 2-for-2 on the power play and launched 39 shots at Miners’ goalie Jeremy Pominville.
“It was the same thing we did all season to win hockey games,” Strachan said.
“We played an upbeat tempo, played our gameplan, and our special teams was outstanding.
“We kept the game simple and earned the victory because we had 20 guys contributing to the cause in some way,” he added.
Lyndon Lipinski led the way offensively with two goals and an assist while Bryce Lipinski, Mason Meyer, Brent Aiken, and Miles Nolan (empty-netter) also scored.
Lucas DeBenedet, the SIJHL’s leading goal scorer this season who was unable to light the lamp in Wellington in five games, chalked up three assists against Kirkland Lake while Cartney made 30 saves.
In the tourney opener, the Lakers only trailed Toronto Lakeshore 2-1 midway through the third period before Buitenhuis and Shier teamed up to take over the game.
Buitenhuis turned aside Aiken and DeBenedet on back-to-back breakaways—the second an unbelievable pad save that even had the FastHockey.com play-by-play announcer fooled as he originally called it a goal.
Soon after, Shier drove the right-wing and cut to the middle before lasering a shot past Cartney for his second goal of the game to make it 3-1 and put the Patriots in charge.
Michael Prapavessis and Doug Bonar also scored for Toronto Lakeshore while Buitenhuis posted 27 saves.
Aiken, on a power-play one-timer at 18:03 of the second set up by Kevin Kurm and Nolan, had the lone Lakers’ goal while Cartney had 35 stops.
Strachan tried to keep the message upbeat in the dressing room after his team watched its season slip away.
“Seeing the tears in some eyes and dismal faces, I tried to keep it all positive and didn’t reflect on what just happened but talked about our accomplishments as a team throughout the year,” Strachan recalled.
“I talked about what we had overcome to be in that situation and win a championship, and then spoke about our achievement of making the semi-finals at the Dudley Hewitt Cup.”
Toronto Lakeshore, who edged the host Dukes 2-1 in Saturday night’s final, advanced to the five-team RBC Royal Bank Cup national junior ‘A’ championship in Vernon, B.C., which begins Saturday and runs until May 18.
