Petes limp into break
Sunday afternoon loss in Hamilton fifth straight
HAMILTON – There may be no OHL team in greater need of a Christmas break then the Peterborough Petes.
The Pet es reached the season’ s midway mark in virtual free-fall after a fifth consecutive loss Sunday afternoon 5-2 to the Hamilton Bulldogs before 3,201 fans at FirstOntario Centre.
After staring the season 8-2 to rocket to the top of the Eastern Conference, the Petes have gone 7-15-1-1 slipping to sixth. They are 16 points behind first place Hamilton.
The Petes struggles started with a rash of injuries which hasn’t abated. They played Sunday with Cole Fraser, Declan Chisholm and Nick Isaacson injured and Austin Osmanski suspended. Hamilton was without two key forwards Marian Studenic and Nicholas Caamano.
The Petes didn’t play that bad except for the opening 12 minutes when they dug a 3-0 hole. They took the first three penalties and Hamilton scored on two. Dylan Wells was chased from the net after three goals on 11 shots in 11:19. Hunter Jones completed the game stopping 16 of 18 shots. The Petes couldn’t buy a break hitting six goal posts.
“At this point (a break) is not going to hurt us, if anything it’s going to help,” said Petes’ captain Logan DeNoble. “Guys can go home and regroup and get away from the rink for a little bit and maybe come back with more positive thoughts. It’s almost like a restart.”
There is no one who thinks they should be in this position, he said.
“You look at the guys we have on our roster and we know we have the ability to do it with the guys we have,” said DeNoble. “There is no reason for us losing like this. We have the ability to do it and we showed it at the start of the season.”
Right now nothing is going their way, said DeNoble.
“Today was no different. We gave up a couple of goals pretty quickly. We were trying to battle back and I’d say we had a decent second and pretty good third but we were hitting post after post it seemed and couldn’t do anything to put a puck in the net. That was frustrating.”
Hamilton is 15-2-2 in their last 19 games and early on couldn’t miss. Ryan Moore cashed in a backdoor feed on an early power play. Brandon Saigeon also converted on a manadvantage followed by a Connor McMichael goal 2:29 later and it looked like the rout was on. Nikita Korostelev scored both Petes’ goals including cashing in Matt Timms’s set up to cut the deficit to 3-1 at 16:59. Arthur Kallyev replied 31 seconds later to restore the three-goal margin.
“We came out of the gate pretty slow,” said Petes’ coach Jody Hull. “We spotted them a pretty nice cushion. We weren’t able to recover. When you’re playing the top team in your conference you can’t do that to yourself. We did play better in the second and third. It’s small consolation but we did hit six goal posts.”
Zachary Jackson scored the lone goal of the second period. Korostelev tallied 2:26 into the third finishing a three-way passing play from Nick Robertson and Bobby Dow.
“We have to refocus and figure out as a staff what we can do to get these guys out of their funk,” said Hull. “The players have to do their part, too. If they come back ready to go and want to put the work and the effort into it, we can get this thing going in the right direction.”