Sidelines: Best team doesn’t win every time
Vees fall short against Trail, but not due to a lack of talent or effort
In a best-of-seven playoff series, you’d like to think the best team is ultimately going to win. More often than not, that is the case. Sometimes, it isn’t. And for the losing team, it’s even more painful.
The Penticton Vees were the better team against the Trail Smoke Eaters. Despite losing the series 4-3, the Vees outscored Trail 27-24, dominating the three games they won and outplaying the Smokies for long stretches of the four they lost.
Of the 21 periods of hockey (excluding 95 seconds of overtime in Game 3), the Vees were the better team in 15 of them.
The Smoke Eaters — despite having a healthy lineup compared to a Vees’ lineup wracked by injuries — were opportunistic. And lucky.
And they got plenty of help from the officiating, which was, as usual in this league, largely sub-par in this series.
In Game 3, with the Vees up 2-0 in the series, the four game officials allowed a Trail goal that everyone else in the Cominco Arena and those watching on the Internet could clearly see was high-sticked into the net. It proved decisive as, even though the Vees tied the game with 19.5 seconds left, Trail won it in overtime to completely turn the series around.
In the first period of Game 4, the referee ejected Vees captain and first-line centre Owen Sillinger for a laughable interpretation of what was nothing more than a wrestling match near the Vees’ bench.
With so many other key players missing, the Vees could not overcome the loss of their heart-and-soul leader for the remaining 44 minutes of hockey.
In Game 5, Vees defenceman Michael Campoli was splattered into the boards with a blatantly illegal check and forced to leave the game. That was followed by three straight penalties against the Vees, and — with their top shut-down defenceman unavailable — the game-tying power-play goal and a complete change in momentum that led to a 4-3 Trail win.
A bloodied Campoli, who also had his hand broken on the play, bravely returned and played with the injury for the rest of the series.
In Game 7, Penticton was down 1-0 thanks to another extremely fortuitous Trail bounce. With all kinds of infractions going uncalled, the officials dumped a bench minor for too many men on the ice on the Vees during a chaotic line change at both benches. Trail scored to make it 2-0 and the Vees were in chase mode from there.
You always felt like the Vees would crank it up and deliver when they needed to, such as the 6-1 rout in Game 6 in Trail with their season on the line.
But suddenly you’re down 2-0, and then 3-0 on a shorthanded goal early in the second, the crowd is restless and the hill is too great to climb despite the full-court press put on by the Vees for the last 35 minutes.
Now, sure, the Vees were far from perfect in the series. The penalty killing, which was fantastic throughout the season and through the first six playoff games, surrendered six goals in the last five games.
You don’t want to pin it all on goaltender Adam Scheel, who was magnificent throughout the season as the Vees won the President’s Trophy for best regular-season record in the BCHL.
Still, the numbers are the numbers and Scheel’s save percentage of .874 in the Trail series was a huge drop-off from his .927 mark in the regular season.
The Vees outshot the Smoke Eaters in every game except Game 5 (and even that was only 27-26). For the series, the Vees outshot the Smoke Eaters by a sizeable 232 to 182 (an average of 33-26 per game).
I didn’t think Trail goalie Adam Marcoux was spectacular, but as one observer noted, he seemed to make the big save when his team needed it most.
As mentioned, injuries were definitely a factor. While the Vees were still the better team in the series, the injuries that robbed them of key players such as Grant Cruikshank and Ryan O’Connell in the regular season and Nicky Leivermann, Cassidy Bowes and Jack Barnes in the playoffs certainly levelled the playing field, and made it more conceivable that the Smoke Eaters — if all the breaks went their way (and they did) — could pull out the win.
The loss of Barnes in the Trail series further depleted a forward group missing two top-six guys in Cruikshank and Bowes. And it was a reprehensible attack by Trail’s Ethan Martini that — while it did result in a five-game suspension to the defenceman — hurt the Vees a lot more than it did the Smoke Eaters.
If what Martini did occurred in the NHL, he would have probably got a 15-game ban. Instead, Martini gets to come back and play and Barnes is still recuperating from the vicious attack.
Yes, the 2017-18 season has ended far sooner than most of us anticipated for the Vees. There were extenuating circumstances that included close to 300 man games lost to injury, but it was a resilient group that battled hard every night, a group that was well prepared for every game by the coaching staff led by Fred Harbinson.
What happened in the deciding game of a riveting seven-game series shouldn’t define what truly was a wonderful season. From a personal standpoint, I thought it was — top to bottom — one of the fastest, most skilled and entertaining Vees teams ever. I was really looking forward to going up against Wenatchee starting Friday at the SOEC in what would have been a true marquee matchup.
The bitter taste of defeat still burns — and will for a while yet — but this group has absolutely nothing to be ashamed about. They gave it everything there was to give — on and off the ice — and that should be appreciated by the fans and the entire community. They can walk proudly as Vees — the best Junior-A hockey organization in the country — with their heads held high.
History is dotted with superior teams who deserved a better fate in the playoffs.
It’s sports, it happens. Play that series over again five times and I bet the Vees win every time.
Sometimes, it’s just not meant to be. But you know Harbinson will have them back in the hunt again next season. He always does. David Crompton is a sports reporter at the Penticton Herald.