Jr. A Lakers fall to Chiefs
Jake Fox has three goals, two assists in 11-8 loss
The Peterborough Merit Precision Junior A Lakers put up a good battle Monday night at the Memorial Centre but ultimately fell 11-8 to the Burlington Chiefs in front of 262 fans.
The score was tied 8-8 in a hardfought back and forth battle through 40 minutes. Ryan Smith and Patrick Kaschalk each scored third-period goals to give them hat tricks and lead the Chiefs to the win. Burlington improved to 4-1 and is the highestscoring team in the OLA Junior A league.
The Lakers were hoping to maintain the momentum they had created with an impressive win over the Six Nations Arrows a week ago but just couldn’t achieve the same level of performance.
“In comparison to our effort last game, I think we were half a step behind where we played the other night. Our energy level wasn’t there,” said head coach Ken Watson. “We’ve made some positive steps from the start of the year to now but we failed to execute in a couple of scenarios and we also gave up some easy ones that we should have been better with.”
Captain Jake Fox had another excellent game for the Lakers, scoring three times and adding two assists to lead the team. Curtis Conley added a goal and three helpers. Drew Hutchison suffered the loss in net.
Peterborough scored four goals in each of the first two periods while Burlington scored five in the first and three in the second. The Chiefs twice took two-goal leads but the Lakers responded with two goals in less than two minutes each time.
Watson emphasized that even though the Lakers have lost five games, there is time to fight back into the thick of the playoff mix, as long as they keep taking steps forward.
“When you look at the schedule, there’s 14 games left. Even with the mistakes we made tonight, if we’d played the way we did tonight earlier on we’d probably have a couple more wins,” Watson said. “So there’s been progress. There’s been steps forward. Compared to the Six Nations game I think we took a half step back. We just have to learn from it, build on it. We’ve got three big games coming up.”
“We were scoring and we were getting transition opportunities,” Watson said of the positives from the game for the Lakers. “We probably could have had two or three more out of 10 or 11 transition opportunities that we didn’t bury.”
The Lakers are still awaiting the return of forwards Ethan Walker, Kyle Killen and Taite Cattoni as well as defenders Jourdan Stouros and Tyler Gaulton.
Peterborough is back home for a rare Friday night game this week against the Whitby Warriors then play their fourth straight home game next Monday against the Mimico Mountaineers before travelling to Orangeville to face the Northmen next Tuesday.