Joey Payeur
With only 16 skaters to start, and with a quarter of those gone by the end of the game for various reasons, the Dryden Ice Dogs had no business hanging with the fourth-ranked team in the country.
But it was only after, in their opinion, getting the business end of a bad non-call that proved too much to come back from in the end against the Fort Frances Lakers at the Ice For Kids Arena last night.
A high stick that was let go by referee Duane Turriff quickly was followed by Kevin Kurm setting up captain Patrick Sofer with less than five minutes to go for a 4-2 Lakers’ lead that eventually turned into a 6-3 victory and 14th-straight win.
“There’s two guys jousting, and one of their guys brings his stick up and cuts our guy wide open,” said frustrated Ice Dogs’ assistant coach Mike English, who is filling in for head coach Paul Maclean for the next two weeks as Maclean is in Toronto following the recent death of his mother.
“Then they score 10 seconds later. It was a backbreaker. . . .
“It’s a tough job [to referee],” conceded English. “We’re just looking for more consistency.”
Sofer’s fifth of the year at 15:44 of the third for Fort Frances (15-1-0-1) was followed by penalties assessed to Lakers’ defencemen Cody Wickstrom (boarding) and Kyle Lipinski (cross-checking), which gave the Ice Dogs (9-11) a golden opportunity to pull even.
The visitors managed to get one back when Dane Feeney deflected Derek McPhail’s point shot at 18:23 for Dryden’s third power-play goal of the night to make it 4-3.
But still on a power play, and with goalie Robert Kopytek-MacKenzie pulled for a 6-on-4 advantage, the Ice Dogs allowed Lyndon Lipinski to break across centre, where he then slid the puck into the empty cage with 1:08 left for his eighth of the season.
Wickstrom then pulled off the long-distance bank shot 11 seconds later—again with Kopytek-MacKenzie on the bench—to give the Lakers back-to-back short-handed goals.
It was Wickstrom’s first goal in four games since returning to the lineup after missing the first 13 games of the season with a lengthy illness, which he revealed to be ulcerative colitis.
“I basically have holes in my colon,” explained the 20-year-old from Marquette, Mich.
“I have some medications that I will be on for a long time, but I’m slowly weaning myself off of [them],” he added.
“I feel 100 percent better than I did a month ago.”
And as for the bank shot, Wickstrom confessed with a smile, “It was definitely unplanned.”
“It never works for me in practice, but I was lucky enough that it did in a game,” he noted.
The start of the game was pushed back by a short Remembrance Day ceremony, which included a ceremonial puck drop by Gordie Calder of the Allan Cup-winning 1952 Fort Frances Canadians.
Lucas DeBenedet opened the scoring at 19:19 of the first period when he beat Kopytek-MacKenzie high to the glove side for his league-leading 15th goal of the season.
“I don’t know if it was the [pre-game] ceremony or not, but both teams were lethargic in the first,” noted Lakers’ head coach and general manager Wayne Strachan.
Newly-acquired Tim Kavanaugh made good on a power-play with his goal at 2:57 of the second to tie the game.
Riley Daly replied with his second of the year on a Lakers’ man-advantage at 8:47 to make it 2-1.
Fort Frances went up 3-1 when DeBenedet appeared to hook Brendan Enns to the ice deep in the Dryden zone, allowing Meyer to grab the loose puck and beat Kopytek-MacKenzie from in close for his ninth of the year at 10:12 of the third.
Chris Sitko’s power-play marker made it 3-2 before Sofer brought about the beginning of the end for Dryden, which now has lost two-straight.
Jordan Cartney made 21 saves for the victory while Kopytek-MacKenzie had 35 stops for the Ice Dogs.
“I’m just working hard . . . it doesn’t come easy,” Cartney said about his red-hot early-season performance.
“I’m coming out challenging more and I’m working on my rebound control, which wasn’t very good earlier in the season,” he noted.
Bryce Lipinski (one-game suspension), John Dora (upper-body injury), and Cam Gobeil (healthy scratch) sat out last night’s game, with Hunter Leishman back into the lineup after sitting the last two.
The Lakers finish the home-and-home series with the Ice Dogs tomorrow night in Dryden before getting a well-earned 10-day break.
Their next home game is Nov. 22 against the Wisconsin Wilderness.
