It wasn’t the way the North Bay Battalion were looking to ring in the New Year, after a 5-1 loss at home to the visiting Ottawa 67’s on Friday.
Summed up in three words by Battalion Head Coach Ryan Oulahen who described the result as a “really disappointing effort.”
“I thought it was probably the first time this year that we clearly got extremely frustrated,” says Oulahen whose team has now lost six in a row and sees their record fall to 16-11-2-2.
“You’re going to play opponents that are going to pre-scout you and try to make things difficult on you, and give Ottawa credit, they really clogged up the neutral zone and made things really hard, but I didn’t think we battled and competed hard enough through those.”
Coming off a 5-4 loss on Wednesday to Mississauga, the Troops got off to a good start in the first.
The league's leading scorer got the Battalion their first and only lead of the game at 9:33 of the first period. Brandon Coe took a pass down the left wing and made a move to give him some space in the middle before beating the goaltender Will Cranley on the glove side for his 20th of the season. It's the second straight year in which the San Jose Sharks prospect has scored at least 20 goals in a season.
However, from that point, the game started to go down hill for the home side. The Battalion led 7-1 in shots at that moment, but Ottawa started to show signs that this was going to be a long afternoon at the rink for the Troops.
Gavin Ewles scored his first career OHL goal at 14:58 to tie the game 1-1.
In the second, the 67’s got an early shorthanded goal from Thomas Sirman (1) at 4:23 and just over two minutes later, Brady Stonehouse (7) took a stretch pass from Brenden Sirizzoti over the Battalion blue line, toe dragged around Matvey Petrov and dangled over to Joe Vrbetic’s glove side, beating the netminder in the process for a memorable highlight reel goal.
It would mark the end of the night for Vrbetic (13-4-2-2) who was pulled from the game, in favour of Dom DeVincentis, who got the start in the Wednesday night loss.
At the time he was pulled, the Battalion had registered just one shot on net in the second period, and would be held to two throughout those 20 minutes.
“We pretty much lost most of the 50/50 battles. It was an absolute team effort in the wrong direction,” says Oulahen.
While the team played with just 10 forwards in the Mississauga game, they dressed 11 on Friday against Ottawa, adding a seventh defenceman in the process to have a full 18 player squad on the ice, but Oulahen says it didn’t really matter who was out there for most of the game.
“There weren't many guys pulling the right way and while you need your leaders to step up, oftentimes if they are rolling the right way, everyone else is going to follow, but you can’t let other guys off the hook, we need an overall better effort from everyone,” says Oulahen.
The Troops were awarded a penalty early on in the third, but it was Stonehouse (8) who scored the second shorthanded goal of the game for the visiting 67’s that really put the game out of reach at 1:34 of the third.
Vsevolod Gaidamak (14) added to the total at 8:45.
With the Troops looking to put that one behind them and turn the calendar to a new year, Oulahen says, “Adversity is a great thing if you handle it the right way. We need to understand that this clearly can’t happen if we want to be a good team in the second half. You can’t get away with outings like that.”
