The Battalion is forging ahead and starting to make some distance between themselves and the rest of the Central Division.
The Troops, thanks to a 3-0-0-1 stretch, has build up a five point lead on the second place Sudbury Wolves.
The Battalion is coming off a pair of weekend wins including a 5-2 win on the road in Barrie, followed up by a thrilling 3-2 overtime comeback win over the nationally ranked Erie Otters Sunday night.
Tonight they face the 8-10-1 Kingston Frontenacs who sit in the basement of the East Division right now, but are only seven points back of the Battalion the Conference.
“This week we have a very good defensive team in Kingston coming in with one of the top goalies in the league and then we have to go to London the next day - we can’t leave Thursday night so that’s going to be a long trip and then we come back here and play Barrie, a divisional opponent on Sunday so as much as last weekend was great our focus is now on this weekend and hopefully we can build upon what we did last weekend,” stated Butler at his weekly media conference at Memorial Gardens on Wednesday.
Despite the recent success, Butler doesn’t want his team to get too comfortable. He reminds everyone despite the decent ranking now there is not much room between second place in the conference and 10th place.
“It’s really, really tight,” stated Butler.
The offence seems top heavy with McKenzie and Harland leading the way with 24 and 22 points respectively. Then there’s a drop off to Zach Poirier who sits with 13 points in 20 games.
But right now Butler wants to be patient with this group that is continuing to improve.
“I’m probably more apt to work a little bit harder as a coach and develop the guys I got so my thing right now is I’m just watching our team playing and trying to learn about our team - trying to maximize what we got and try to get us to the point where every day when we go onto the ice for practice, everyone is all business which will allow us to improve then we will have a better indication of where we are at,” he said.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t see more room for improvement. He would like to see his team cut down its goals against which is at 3.75; high for the traditionally defensive squad to allow.
“I don’t think we’ve really played that good of team defence this year,” Butler said bluntly.
“I think we’ve probably given up one easy goal a game in the sense that we have a defenceman fall and they get a breakaway, whatever. I mean our goaltending, I think to be fair to Brent and Matthew has been average, I mean they haven’t been bad but I know both of them are capable of much more as well.”