On September 21st 2018, Daniel Walker scored the first goal of the season for the North Bay Battalion in an eventual 7-5 win over the defending OHL champion Hamilton Bulldogs.
Walker was also the first to score for the Battalion in the post-season. His first career OHL Playoff goal made it 1-0 for North Bay en route to a 5-2 win, leading to a split of the first two games against the Niagara IceDogs in the OHL Eastern Conference Quarterfinals.
Walker says the backhanded shot that got through the pads of Stephen Dhillon at 8:41 of the first period wasn’t even an intended shot. He says, “I just put it on net. I didn’t even see the goalie, I just backhanded it towards him and I guess he didn’t see and he dropped to late and it went five hole.”
After Dhillion made 23 saves in a game one shutout, Walker says the early goal gave the team a ton of confidence.
“We thought we weren’t getting enough chances in the first game and we got those first two really quick and all the boys were fired up,” said Walker.
The second one Walker speaks of, came less than a minute later when Justin Brazeau got some room in the middle of the zone and took a forehand shot that just had enough air under it to sail over the stick side of Dhillon.
Before the ten minute mark of the first, North Bay had a 2-0 lead and Battalion Assistant Coach Adam Dennis says they needed a start like that, considering the slow start in Game One.
"We knew coming into the series that this team starts games quick and our goal was to try and match their intensity and we knew if we did that than we would have a chance," said Dennis.
"I thought we did a good job of that today and we went on to score a couple of goals, which was nice.”
And while the Troops gave those two goals back in the second period, this was a game in which they never relinquished the lead.
Akil Thomas (1) helped Niagara come out of the gates with a lot of jump in their step and he was able to get the puck past Christian Propp at 2:06 of the second.
Ben Jones (1) found the back of the net three minutes later to put game two into a 2-2 tie.
But that’s as close as they got as Propp would go on to make 43 saves in the game, a combined 93 through the first two games of the series.
“I thought again that our goalie gave us a chance to win,” said Dennis post game.
Propp made several key saves over the next few minutes and it looked like Niagara were right back to where they left off in Game One, until Mitchell Russell took a pass into the offensive zone, made a move to beat the defence and promptly got the puck through the pads of Dhillon to regain the lead for the Battalion.
“It was a nice play for Primeau to get me the puck and I kind of bobbled it a bit, but the D jumped and I knew I had to pull it into the middle,” says Russell of the play that led to the goal.
He added, “I think just putting pucks on Dhillon will get good results and that’s what I did. It’s what we want to do, make him work, throw pucks at his feet and it’s what we did tonight.”
Primeau finished the night with three points. After assisting on the second and third goals of the game, he expanded the North Bay lead to two once again, less than two minutes after the Russell goal.
At 11:08 of the second period, Primeau capped off a sustained offensive attack with his first playoff goal. The Battalion had control on the man advantage and maintained possession even after Niagara’s Ivan Lodnia came out of the box and rejoined the play. There was a moment where it looked like Lodnia was going to be able to steal the puck and get it passed Theo Calvas at the blue line, but Calvas held steady, maintained position and fed it up to Primeau who buried it for a two goal advantage.
Niagara IceDogs head coach Billy Burke was not thrilled with his teams effort. He says, “I just think we thought we could just show up and it would be easy and there wouldn’t be any push back. Obviously they had a good game plan and it worked.”
Through the two games, the IceDogs, who boasted the leagues top offence with a league-high 326 goals in the regular season, has been held to four goals through two games.
Burke was asked if he thought there was anything North Bay was doing to stymie the IceDogs offensive abilities, and he says, “they are stingy and they are good defensively, they can make the neutral zone difficult to get through, but it’s not the end of the world. We need to grunt it out and there’s no rush there, they are taking the rush away. We need to chip it by them and be physical and be patient.”
Brad Chenier would finish the scoring for North Bay by scoring an empty net goal and giving North Bay the 5-2 win.
The Troops had five different goal scorers in the game and Dennis says, “Any time we’ve had our secondary scoring come out and deliver than we typically have success.”
The series now heads north as the Battalion hosts Games 3 and 4 on Tuesday and Thursday respectively and then will move back to St. Catharines for Game 5 on Friday.
