Panago midgets fail to find scoring touch

Home-ice advantage was no advantage to the Prince George Westwood Panago Cougars.

With the chance to advance to the final of the Bon Voyage Inn/Carmel Inn midget Tier 2 hockey tournament Sunday morning at Kin 2, the Cougars’ offence came out as flat as the pizzas their team sponsor makes.

A 3-1 loss to the Williams Lake Timberwolves in the semifinal was a sour ending for the P.G. boys in their one and only home tournament of the season.

“This weekend was pretty tough – there are some good teams here and we battled hard, outshot a lot of the teams and outplayed them but just couldn’t put the puck in the net,” said Cougars captain Austin Guignard.

“We weren’t driving hard enough to the net, it just wasn’t working for us.”

After a scoreless opening 20 minutes, the game was decided in the second period. Justin Swan opened the scoring for Williams Lake with 10 minutes left in the period and the Cougars responded quickly, with Alex Nimmo converting a chance a couple minutes later. But Swan took advantage of a turnover in Cougar territory and beat Prince George goalie Josh Adams for what stood as the winning goal with 4:35 left in the period.

Dan Powers added an empty-netter in the dying seconds. Both of Swan’s goals came as a result of intercepted passes.

“Their forecheck was pretty good, they play their system really well,” said Cougars defenceman Hayden Kerr. “It’s the little things that we have to work on in practice, the four-foot passes, that’s what cost us the game. Traffic in front of the net was a big thing (the Cougars were unable to muster), we weren’t banging in greasy ones.”

The Timberwolves have won three of the four head-to-head encounters with the Cougars this season.

The Cougars started Friday with a 3-2 loss to Chilliwack and tied Fort St. John 3-3, then on Saturday lost 4-2 to Central Okanagan, followed by a 3-1 win over Terrace.

“The boys played hard all weekend, they just had a hard time putting the puck into the net,” said Cougars head coach Don Gaboury. “Even though our record wasn’t great all weekend I thought we played good hockey but we couldn’t put the puck in the net. We had quite a few chances early on (Sunday) to go up and didn’t take advantage of it and that was the story of the weekend.”