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South Island Lite - Looks Great, Less Filling

South Island Thunderbirds, January 04, 2009

There is always the bright side.  Down one goal to the Fraser Valley Bruins on Sunday morning at Chilliwack’s beautiful Prospera Centre Arena with the game on the line in the third period, the South Island Thunderbirds dominated the play and generated well more than the legal limit on quality scoring chances.  It was one of the T-Birds’ best periods of the season and Head Coach Rob Milliken acknowledged that “we can’t play much better than that”.

But something was missing, well actually the shooters were missing – the open part of the net that is.  Breakaways, point blank shots from the doorstep, rebounds, one-timers, point shots… all but one found some part of the anatomy of Bruins’ goaltender Ross Baasdvik’ or missed the net altogether.  In the end, it goes down as another loss, this time by a final score of 3 – 1, and the South Island team had to head back to the Island with nothing to show for their weekend’s hard work and a lot of fine play.

After losing by six the day before, this was a great “bounce back” game.  The diminutive Ryan Waldhaus was back in the net and had the look of determination to give his mates a chance to win.  And he delivered in spades.  He was tested 15 times in the first period and was solid throughout, holding the Bruins scoreless.  At the other end, Baasdvik faced nine shots in the opening frame and was also up to the task, though he faced fewer tough shots than his counterpart.

The Bruins were first to score, moving ahead 1 – 0 after one minute in the second period when the 6’-3” 204 pound gorilla Mike Tebbutt knocked in a rebound from the edge of the crease after Brandon Formosa cut across the middle and fired a wrist shot back from the right face-off circle.  The Thunderbirds thought they tied the game just over a minute later in a scrum in front of the Bruins’ net but the referee blew the whistle and then handed out multiple penalties for roughing after the whistle.  The Bruins enjoyed the edge in play overall that period and outshot the Thunderbirds again by the same 15 – 9 margin.  Once again, Waldy was moving well and controlling his rebounds and held the Bruins to their one goal lead.

The third period simply belonged to South Island from start to finish.  There were breakaways by Sam Rice, Chase Kaiser and Ryan Matthews and a multitude of chances of every other description.  The T-Birds out-shot their opponent 19 – 9 in the 20 minutes and did everything but win.  In fact, it was the Bruins who tallied first in the period, extending their lead to 2 – 0 at 8:09 on a long wrist shot from Justin Kirsch on the power play that went in off Waldhaus’ glove.

Finally, with just over five minutes remaining, the Birds’ beat Baasdvik on a nice set-up from Ryan Matthews to Wes Myron.  Entering the Bruins’ zone on a 2 on 2, Mathews went wide right and drew the second defender to him as he started to go by his own check.  Matthews then flipped a backhand pass right onto Myron’s stick coming down the middle and Wes one-timed the shot past Baasdvik’s blocker.

Unfortunately, the T-Birds’ renewed hope was quickly dashed by the Bruins’ clinching goal that came just 17 seconds later, once again from Kirsch who notched his fifth goal of the weekend and 17^th of the season on another hard wrist shot from the left face-off circle.

Looking at the weekend’s play overall, it is encouraging that South Island can match up so well against the third place team in the league.  The combined shots on goal for the two games were 69 – 64, just slightly in favor of the Bruins and the number of quality scoring chances was no worse than even.  The bottom line is simply that three goals is not enough production for two games and the team will need more scoring in the weeks ahead to move up in the standings.  The goals should come if the T-Birds play as well as they did today.

While not all of the results from the weekend were available at the time this was written, the T-Birds have slipped out of sixth place, now trailing the Valley West Hawks by at least two points.  Those two teams face each other next weekend on this side of the pond.  Next Saturday’s game is at Sooke at 6:00 PM and then the teams hook up again on Sunday morning at 10:30 AM at Naden.

Bird Droppings:  The final shots on goal today were 15-15-9=39 for the Bruins and 9-9-19=37 for the Thunderbirds… The South Island scoring summary today included:  Matthews (1A) and Myron (1G).  Fraser Valley’s scorers were:  Tebbutt (1G, 1A), Graham (1A), Formosa (1A), Kirsch (2G), Lambert (1A) and Frizzell (1A)… Fraser Valley was assessed 28 minutes in penalties (nine minors and a game misconduct) while South Island received 18 minutes (9 minors)… The Bruins were 1 for 7 on the power play and the T-Birds were 0 for 7… Chase Kaiser was given a penalty for charging in the first period while he was sitting on the players’ bench.  The infraction was really Brandon Nicholson’s but the referee was “pretty sure” it was Kaiser so sent Chase from the bench to the penalty box instead.

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