HITMEN COWBOY UP TO DOWN THE PATS
Junior squad pays tribute to short-lived WHA squad as Corral Series continues
The World Hockey Association was known for its high-energy games.
Plenty of goals.
And plenty of fights.
That wasn’t exactly the case in the Corral Series salute to the Calgary Cowboys on Wednesday night at the Stampede Corral.
But that didn’t take the shine off a Calgary Hitmen victory over the Regina Pats.
Dressed in Cowboys red duds, the host Hitmen (27-19-4-1) won the second game of the Corral Series 4-3 in what was a rather uninspiring affair, despite the night’s celebration of the shortlived (1975-77) WHA team.
“Yeah ... I didn’t think it was very pretty. We ground one out,” said Hitmen head coach Steve Hamilton. “It’s good on our guys, and credit to Regina — I thought their plan was to muddy the waters. They just work, work, work ... but we got it done in the third period. I thought our leaders were trying to pull the rope a little bit to get us going, and we had to slog through it. It wasn’t a Picasso.”
One of those veterans, Riley Stotts, scored the winner with just 3:19 remaining, as he made a sweet move coming out of the left wing corner to zip a backhand by Pats goaltender Max Paddock for his 15th goal of the season.
Apart from that, it was veteran Kaden Elder with a pair of goals and captain Mark Kastelic with a goal and an assist.
“I think we started out a little slow — we didn’t play to our potential,” Elder said.
“We kind of rallied around that in the second and third periods and picked it up. We were able to play our game then, and shut those guys down in a big (six-onfive) situation at the end of the game.”
The Hitmen hit the Corral ice to the twangs of Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy, the song to which the Cowboys used to enter back in their WHA days.
Cowboys jerseys new and old, including odes to former stars Ron Chipperfield, Danny Lawson and Don ‘Smokie’ McLeod, could be seen throughout the stands in the Corral.
Russ Peake introduced the lineups and fellow former Cowboys public address announcer Darrel Janz and the Cowboys’ former athletic trainer, Jim ‘Bearcat’ Murray, and the latter two performed the ceremonial faceoff.
And the building’s longtime organist, Irene Besse, was on hand entertaining the crowd during stoppages in play.
On the ice, the first period went scoreless, as the teams both struggled to gain any sort of momentum.
The best chance saw Hitmen winger Luke Coleman sent in all alone by Ryder Korczak, but Coleman was stoned by Paddock, who seemed to have his number all game long.
Teammate Elder finally opened the scoring moments into the second period, firing a shot from the slot past Paddock.
Midway through the middle stanza, the Pats tied it up when Ty Kolle cut hard to the net on a rush and tried to tuck it on the far side of McNaughton.
Five minutes later, Kolle found the back of the net again, finding a loose puck in the slot and firing it low past McNaughton.
The Hitmen then tied it up just over a minute later when captain Kastelic poked home a loose puck that was laying behind Paddock, after Luke Prokop ripped a point-shot that the goalie got a piece of.
Early in the third, Elder put the hosts back on top, stealing the puck in the Pats zone, walking into the slot, and firing a goal over the glove of Paddock.
Five minutes later, the Hitmen couldn’t handle a crossing pass that Kolle got enough of to direct past McNaughton.
With 5:35 remaining, James Malm looked like he had given the Hitmen the lead, with what appeared to be a fancy dangle from forehand to backhand at the side of the net to stuff it home, capping hard work on the shift by Carson Focht. But the would-be winner was waved off after video review.
“Kicked in the crease was the call,” Hamilton said. “They said the overhead showed there was a kicking motion in the crease. I didn’t see it.”
The Hitmen felt it, however, but they didn’t let it deter them, counting the winner just a few minutes later on a beautiful individual effort by Stotts.
“They disallowed it,” Elder said. “And we figured it wasn’t a big deal, that we could come back and definitely keep working through it, and not get down. We had to stay positive because if we didn’t stay positive, we would have shut down, and it would have went downhill from there.”
The win moved the Hitmen, with 59 points, into a tie for the first wild-card slot in the Eastern Conference with the Red Deer Rebels, whom the Hitmen dominated in last Saturday’s 5-1 road victory.
That game — their last outing prior to Wednesday’s Corral Series game — sent the Hitmen into the affair against the Pats (14-36-1-2) having won five of their last six games and drawing points from all six tilts.
Make that six wins in seven games after Wednesday’s victory in front of 4,223 fans.
Game 3 of the Corral Series is next, featuring the Hitmen paying homage to the Calgary Wranglers, the city’s WHL franchise from 1977-87, when they square off Friday against the visiting Prince Albert Raiders at the Corral (7 p.m.).
LOOSE PUCKS
With D Egor Zamula suffering an upper-body injury — a possible concussion — in last Friday’s tilt, associate player Tyson Galloway stepped into the Hitmen lineup to play defence.
The Hitmen were also without D Dakota Krebs, who got knocked out during a fight last Saturday in Red Deer, and forwards Hunter Campbell (lower body) and Jake Kryski (upper body).