DEJECTED JET These Bulldogs have more wins, goals than last year’s team
Here’s a pleasant surprise for Hamilton Bulldogs fans.
Despite losing half of its players to graduation, the Ontario Hockey League club has won more games and scored nearly twice as many goals as it had at this point last season when it went on to win its first OHL championship.
And here’s a not-so-pleasant caveat.
After their first 13 games, the Bulldogs are also being scored upon roughly twice as much.
“I think we’ve got the team and the work ethic to score a lot of goals,” said Matt
Strome, one of 10 returning forwards. “We’ve just got to tighten things up on the back end.”
Over the past 12 months, the Bulldogs have gone from one of the lowest scoring teams in the OHL with 30 goals to one of the highest with 57 — an increase of more than two goals per game on average. Of those, 18 are on the power play, which is a threefold increase over last season when they had six.
Then, their power play was running at 12 per cent. It’s operating in excess of 33 per cent now.
“Our whole power play is clicking and finding chemistry and we’re working together really well in practice,” said Brandon Saigeon, who has scored three of his seven goals with the man advantage. “It starts there.”
The issue is the Bulldogs have also allowed 52 goals at their own end of the rink this campaign — 18 more than they had a year ago. So their offensive gains and defensive losses pretty much cancel each another out.
“Obviously, we want to be good defensively and not let in many goals,” Saigeon said. “But me, being a forward, you want to make sure you’re producing because if we’re lacking defensively we know we’re still confident in our offence to score more goals than them.”
His coach, however, has doubts.
“We can’t continue to score four, five, six goals per game,” Dave Matsos said. “Eventually the well is going to dry up and we’ve got to figure out how to defend so that when the well dries up, we’re still in games.”
Compared to where they were 13 games into last season, the Bulldogs have also:
• Fired fewer shots on net and sacrificed more,
• Fared better in the faceoff circle,
• Lost (and won) fewer one-goal games, and
• Gone to extra time half as frequently.
Matsos is generally happy with how his team has fared heading into Friday’s game (7 p.m. at FirstOntario Centre) against visiting Oshawa. Given the massive player turnover — not a
single one of his current defencemen was playing for the Bulldogs last October — and the fact that his team has played nine of its first 13 games on the road, he’ll take it.
“Our guys are battling, they’re working hard, they’re taking care of their bodies,” he said. “There are certain areas of our game — (last) weekend we touched on our D zone, touched on our goals against, touched on other things — but they’re doing a lot of really, really good things.”
The Bulldogs, who also host North Bay Sunday (2 p.m. at FirstOntario Centre), start the weekend looking to snap a twogame losing skid.
Notes: Logan Morrison will no longer play for Canada at next month’s World Under-17 Hockey Challenge after suffering what Matsos described as an upper body injury. The rookie forward did not practise on Wednesday and the team wouldn’t provide any timeline for his return.