Dan Falloon
With a roller coaster 2009-10 season just minutes behind them, all the Fort Frances Lakers could do was look back and gasp in awe at what they had accomplished.
“If you’d have said a month or six weeks ago that we’d be playing in Game 6 of the semi-final, I’d have said you were crazy,” captain Tyler Stevenson admitted.
“But once we got here, we were always tough, always upbeat.
“Twenty guys just came together,” he reasoned.
The Lakers’ challenge for SIJHL supremacy began with a seven-game thriller in the over the favoured K&A Wolverines in the first round of the playoffs, which Stevenson helped the Lakers win with an eliminating goal in Game 7.
Then Fort Frances crashed and banged with the Dryden Ice Dogs for six games, with Dryden eventually advancing to the SIJHL final against the Fort William North Stars on the strength of a 3-1 win in Game 6 here Friday night.
The title series is set to start tonight in Thunder Bay.
The optimism of Lakers’ coach Wayne Strachan emerged earlier than it did for some of his charges as the Lakers started to string together a few wins, taking five of eight between Jan. 10 and Feb. 10.
“From the first day of tryouts to the beginning of January, I wouldn’t have thought that we had the shot that we did,” Strachan recalled.
“But then we overcame a lot of adversity [and] now we’re a pretty tight-knit group that raised a lot of heads come playoff time.
“It was a team effort, and it had to be for us to be successful,” he stressed.
Stevenson acknowledged playing 13 games in just over three weeks began to take its toll on the team, which seemed to lose its legs later in the semi-final series against Dryden.
“We’ve played so many games,” he remarked. “Our guys were all really banged up.”
Lakers’ goalie Jameson Shortreed admitted to being “pretty heartbroken” by Friday night’s loss, but aside from a couple of untimely soft goals, there’s very little about the team’s playoff exit that can be chalked up to the 17-year-old rookie and the SIJHL’s goalie of the year, who stepped up his game for the post-season.
“I just wanted to win,” he said.
“You just get a new start at the beginning of the playoffs,” he noted. “The regular season doesn’t matter.”
And as the Lakers forced themselves to have short-term memory loss after some tough playoff outings, they took that attitude to pretty much the entire regular season.
Fort Frances finished fifth in the league—a full 10 points behind fourth-place K&A. Somebody also forgot to remind the Lakers that the Wolverines won eight of the 12 regular-season meetings between the two teams.
But the more impressive effort came against the Ice Dogs given Dryden had taken all 12 regular-season match-ups with the Lakers, and the 50-point gap between the teams was bigger than the 33 points Fort Frances had recorded all year.
A renewed commitment to the defensive game played the biggest role in the Lakers’ playoff emergence.
The team’s goals against average, for instance, declined by nearly two goals a game in the post-season (from 4.83 to 2.92), led primarily by Shortreed, who increased his save percentage from 0.895 to 0.923 for the playoffs.
“Our defence really rose up to the challenge,” Strachan lauded. “They were just solid throughout the 13 games.”
The ability to keep the puck out of their net was extremely timely since the Lakers didn’t have an easier time knocking any extra pucks into the opposition’s goal.
The team’s goals per game average dipped slightly from 2.94 during the regular season to 2.85 in the post-season.
And in the end, the dried-up attack sunk the Lakers, who managed only a goal a game in their Game 5 and Game 6 losses to Dryden.
“We didn’t get our forecheck going,” Strachan said.
“We told them from the beginning of the playoffs, we had to dominate below the net, and we didn’t do that in the last two games,” he stressed.
Strachan also felt the heightened intensity of playoff hockey, coupled with the team’s high-octane game plan, started to erode the team’s energy.
“We had seven hard-fought games against K&A and then four more against Dryden,” he noted. “We were definitely feeling the effect of playoff hockey.”
In Friday night’s clincher, Fort Frances took 39 shots on Dryden goalie Josh Baker yet rarely seemed to truly test him.
One of the Lakers’ best chances came early in the game when Cody Edwards nearly stole the puck off Baker, who had wandered to the corner to collect a shoot-in.
The Ice Dogs got on the board soon after when Tanner Harms gathered up a Jon Mitchell rebound, outwaited Shortreed, and lifted a shot over the outstretched 17-year-old at 10:11.
Fort Frances battled back to tie the game at 15:26, with Jordan Carne deflecting Morgan McNeill’s blast into the Dryden net.
The goal was Carne’s fourth of the playoffs, and 12th point overall, setting him as the post-season’s scoring leader after two rounds.
Before the first period was out, though, Chad Liley struck on an Ice Dogs’ power play, taking B.J. McClellan’s feed and eventually snapping a shot over a sprawled Shortreed after fanning on his first attempt.
In a series where the Lakers rarely trailed by more than a goal, Dryden essentially drove the game home with Kevin Burton’s rocket midway through the second period.
Burton slapped a shot off the post and in at 10:57 to put the visitors up 3-1.
Strachan said his team tried to stay positive on the bench, but in the end the two-goal deficit was just too much to overcome.
“It definitely gets in your mind,” he noted. “[But] as a coach, you don’t want to think negative things, and you just try to keep the guys in the middle, not too high or too low.”
The Lakers weren’t without chances to rally, but Blake Boaz’s rebound attempt was devoured by Baker’s glove.
Byron Katapaytuk later banged a puck through the crease late in the second period, leaving the Ice Dogs with their only victory of the series by more than one goal.
In all, Shortreed made 40 saves for the Lakers while Baker blocked 38 shots.
Meanwhile, planning for the 2010-11 season already has begun. The Lakers’ coaching staff met with each player individually on Monday in order to figure out which ones may be returning next year, which, in turn, will help them figure out the direction the team needs to take with its recruiting.
“Over the next few weeks, we’re going to sit down as a staff and think about where we want the team to go,” said Strachan.
“Then we’ll be starting our recruiting, and we’ll be focusing on what we think we can do to strengthen our team,” he added.
The Lakers may be done on the ice, but still will be active off of it as the team is holding a fish fry on Good Friday (April 2) starting at 5 p.m. at the Couchiching Recreation Centre.
Tickets cost $10 for adults and $6 for kids six and under.
