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Wolves drop second straight, but hometown kid finds the scoresheet for the Spirit

Wolves lose 6-3 for second night in a row

 

What looked like a competitive hockey game took a turn for the worst for the Sudbury Wolves as for the second straight night the local juniors lost 6-3, this time to the Saginaw Spirit.

Sudbury was down a goal heading into the third period and before the fans could react the Spirit piled on three goals and finished off the Wolves, who missed a chance to make up some ground in the standings.

Head Coach David Matsos, hasn’t seen this from his team in a long time.

“It looked like we never practiced defense before, everybody seemed to be puck watching. You got to trust that your buddy is going to do his job. When he does his job, we can afford to make one mistake, but when there’s multiple mistakes on any team eventually it’s going end up costing you. We just had multiple layers,” said Matsos.

He put it on his veterans to step up in situations like this and says he will be meeting with his leadership group this week, because it’s only going to get tougher from here.

“Our horses, this is a 19 and 20-year old league, they got to carry the team and our horses aren’t our horses right now, and I think that just trickles down. We just threw up six periods of hockey that I haven’t seen us hang in a long time consecutively. We got some repairs for sure,” said Matsos.

David Levin extended his point streak to six games and has three goals in his last two but didn’t care much for that after the game.

“Doesn’t matter how many goals I score, or how many goals Sokolov scores, it depends in the end what’s the score. Wasn’t our way today and it wasn’t our way yesterday too so we’re looking forward to winning games,” said Levin.

He agreed with his coach that the work ethic just wasn’t there.

“We got to work harder, back check, fore check, neutral zone, that’s when you win games when you work hard,” said Levin.

But back to back losses or not, the coaching staff didn’t look at it as a missed opportunity, just another hurdle for a team trying to get back in the postseason.

“It is what it is, we can’t change it, we got to make up points somewhere else now. We just put some added pressure on ourselves. It’s nothing that we haven’t been faced with before, so we’re just going to have to respond to it,” said Matsos.

Oddly enough the loudest cheer of the night came when Saginaw made it 5-2.

An odd time to be cheering surely, but it wasn’t that the team scored, it was who scored.

Hanmer native Damien Giroux was taken in the third round in the 2016 OHL Draft by the Spirit and was making his first ever OHL trip and only trip this season to his hometown rink.

When he scored the crowd went wild, and it was easily the biggest crowd of the season.

“It was a dream come true, I’ve been dreaming about having an opportunity to play in this league, in this rink, so just to actually be able to score and get that opportunity is so surreal,” said Giroux.

Giroux who got drafted because of his stellar play with the Sudbury Wolves Minor Midget AAA team had this game on his mind for a long time.

“I had marked my calendar about this game since the start of the season, so I’ve been thinking about it for quite a while and it couldn’t have gone any better,” said Giroux.

After the game he posed for pictures, gave a puck to a young fan and was all smiles.

“I was so thankful to have all my family here, all my friends for the support,” said Giroux.

An added bonus, his Spirit team will spend the weekend up North, as they play North Bay on Sunday.

Here’s how the game got to Giroux’s goal.

The scoring was started by the Sudbury Wolves, Ryan Valentini slid a pass over to David Levin, who has been shooting the puck more often of late.

Levin slapped a one-timer past Evan Cormier to extend his point streak to six games.

The Spirit pounced on the Wolves rebound to get back even, as Hayden Hodgson was in the right place at the right time in front of the net to bang home his 25th of the season.

The Wolves took a penalty later in the period and it was the 4th ranked penalty kill against the 19th ranked power play.

But the latter won out as Filip Hronek scored his sixth of the season to make it 2-1 for Saginaw.

The period ended with the shots tied at 9-9.

The Wolves started out the second period with a bang, tying the game up just 1:26 in.

On the power play, Kyle Capobianco shot from the point which got deflected in front and up into the cross bar.

Alan Lyszczarczyk jumped on the rebound scoring his seventh of the season.

A couple minutes later as a Wolves power play was expiring Cole Coskey fired a wrist shot from the centre of the Wolves zone top left corner to grab the lead back.

Like the end of the first period the Wolves found themselves down by one goal, and the shots were quite close to how they were in the first period 9-7 for Saginaw.

But like Jack and Jill who went up the hill, it tumbled down from there.

Hodgson scored his second of the game and 26th on the year from a nice pass on the power play by Hronek.

Then with the Wolves on the power play the Spirit came down on a odd man rush and the puck found the stick of Giroux who went high on Jake McGrath.

Brady Gilmour added one more for Saginaw and Owen Lane scored his third of the season for Sudbury with the game well out of reach.

It’s an odd weekend for the Wolves who played on Thursday and Friday, but have no other games.

They will have a full week of practice before they welcome Peterborough to town on Friday.

The Petes are third in the Eastern Conference with 52 points.

With the loss on Friday the Wolves move to 19-21-5-0 but don’t lose any ground in their division as every team in the Central had the night off, except for Barrie who lost 4-2 to Hamilton.
 


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