Teams have similar styles
After slow start to season, Salmonbellies came on strong in quest for first Mann Cup since 1991
When New Westminster Salmonbellies head coach Steve Goodwin watches video of the Peterborough Century 21 Lakers he feels like he’s looking in a mirror.
The Bellies’ fifth-year coach sees a lot of similarities between his WLA champions and the MSL champs. The teams will square off for the Mann Cup championship beginning with Game 1 Friday at 10:30 p.m. EST at Queen’s Park Arena in New Westminster, B.C.
“The best way I can put it and this is what I see from afar, and you never know until that first game, is I see two teams that are built very similar,” said Goodwin, who was a teammate of Lakers GM Paul Day with the 1990 Vancouver Burrards, featuring a rookie named John Tavares, who lost in the Mann Cup to the Brooklin Redmen.
“The eastern players always play a strong transition game and I believe that’s the right way to play. We do play a very similar style,” he said. “They get to the bench, they get out of the bench, they get the ball up the floor quickly. That’s very much how we want to play.
“It’s really going to come down to who wants to play and who is going to get the breaks and all those things which go along with winning lacrosse games.”
It may come down to who can limit the other’s transition game.
“I do think it’s going to be a bit of a track meet,” Goodwin said. “The first game might be a bit of a feelout kind of period but I do think there will be a lot of movement this series.”
The Salmonbellies recovered from a slow start this season, they were 5-6 after 11 of 18 games, to finish third. Only four points separated the top four teams. They beat the defending WLA champion Maple Ridge Burrards in a sevengame semifinal and dispatched the Victoria Shamrocks in five games in the final.
“There was a lot of parity in the west this year and even the teams who weren’t in the playoffs like Langley, who finished in last place, we lost to twice early in the year. It tends to be once you get to July 1, I’m sure it’s the same in the MSL, your team starts to gain a little momentum.”
Goodwin believes his team’s fitness was a factor.
“You have to be pretty fit to play the system we play and be able to get up and down the floor,” he said. “I’ve always been a believer that it takes seven to eight games to really get game-fit to play our system.”
The team also took off when it decided to run with goalie Alexis Buque over former junior A Laker Tye Belanger.
“We were going back and forth giving both goalies an opportunity to see who was going to grab a hold of it. It turned out to be Alexis,” Goodwin said.
The Bellies’ offence is led by young star Logan Schuss, Mitch Jones and Kevin Crowley. Their leadership comes from three veterans who are the only holdovers from the New Westminster team which lost to the Lakers in Peterborough in the 2010 Mann Cup – Shayne Bennett, Ian Hawksbee and Curtis Hodgson. They also have established NLL players such as Joel McCready, Mike Messenger and Brett Musketry.
This is the Salmonbellies first trip back to the Mann Cup since 2010. The most decorated team in Mann Cup history, ironically, the Salmonbellies haven’t won the national title in 26 years, since 1991. Goodwin said he only briefly touched on the past with his team in preparing for the series.
“I asked Hawksbee, Bennett and Hodgson to talk about that at one of our practices but other than that this is 2017. Some of the kids were still playing peewee lacrosse or were younger when all that was going on. It’s a completely different series, completely different people, mostly, involved. You just have to go out and play the game.”