Muskie boys roll by Rams

The Muskie boys’ hockey opened the NorWOSSA regular season on the right foot over the weekend—earning 5-0 and 10-1 wins over the host Red Lake Rams.
“It went quite well,” head coach Shane Bliss said. “We didn’t play solid all the way throughout, but . . . I think overall, the offence and defence both played well.”
Bliss insisted neither game was quite as lopsided as the final scores bore out.
The Muskies led Friday night’s game by a meagre 2-0 score with eight minutes left in the third. Then the black-and-gold led only 1-0 halfway through the game on Saturday before netting a handful of goals in a three-and-a-half minute flurry.
“I don’t know what happened,” Bliss admitted. “That folded up Red Lake’s sprits a bit, I think.”
Goalie David Moen started both games. And while Bliss noted the Muskies easily outshot the Rams, his work in net was “solid.”
“Moen had some big saves to keep them off the board,” he added.
George Halverson led the Muskies with eight points over the two games, including two goals Saturday, and was named one of the standout performers of the trip by Bliss.
“It’s good we got the four points,” Halverson said. “We had some problems, but for the most part we did okay. We beat them, so that was good.”
While Halverson said the scoring was impressive on paper, he stressed the games felt much closer—and that there’s not much the team can take from the contests.
“It’s hard to learn something from winning that way,” he remarked.
Moen said if nothing else, it’ll give the Muskies a good start to their season.
“It’s good to gain confidence out of those wins,” he said, adding, “There’s room to improve, but it’s good to have a start like that.”
While the scores were nothing to sneeze at, Bliss admitted there’s still work to be done. He was happier with the team’s discipline over the weekend as opposed to earlier pre-season games, but said the team needs to work on maintaining control of the puck.
“We need to work on giveaways. It’s so costly to give your puck away on your own blueline,” he said, adding the team made “some really errant passes up the middle that we were getting picked off.”
Halverson agreed. “We had a lot of giveaways around both bluelines,” he said, adding stronger teams would have capitalized on those mistakes.
“Red Lake should’ve scored every time,” he stressed, before laughing and crediting the work of Moen with keeping the Muskies on top.
Bliss also insisted his team will need to better utilize its speed to control the flow of games.
“Applying what they’ve got is what we’re working on. They’ve definitely got the speed,” he said.
The problem is getting them to be quick on the ice in a number of situations, “not just when they’ve got the puck on their stick.”
“If you forecheck at half-speed, you’re gonna get beat,” Bliss warned. “You need to take away their time and space, and use your speed to create your own time and space.”
The Muskies played their first home game of the regular season last night against the Kenora Broncos (the outcome was not known prior to press time).
Fort High then will host the Dryden Eagles on Friday night, followed by an exhibition game against a team from Spring Lake Park, Mn. on Saturday afternoon.
The exhibition game is something of a mystery to the Muskies. “They’re Americans, they’ll probably be fast,” Halverson offered.
But their game on Friday night will be their first against Dryden this year—and an important early test for the 2007-08 season.