Resop stymies Mariners
Best-of-seven playoff series all square at two games apiece
Kevin Resop recorded his second playoff shutout and the Truro Bearcats blanked the Yarmouth Mariners 4-0 on Wednesday in Game 4 of a Maritime Junior Hockey League divisional semifinal series.
The best-of-seven affair shifts back to Yarmouth tonight knotted at two games apiece.
Resop stopped all 29 shots he faced to earn first star of the game honours. The 20-year-old hasn’t allowed a goal in 120 minutes in the playoffs at the Rath Eastlink Community Centre.
Last Saturday, he shut down the Mariners by making 25 saves in a 1-0 triumph.
“Calming influence,” Bearcats’ coach Shawn Evans said of Resop. “I don’t want to jinx anything, but whatever he’s doing he needs to keep doing it. He’s given us confidence, he has confidence and I’m hoping it will continue.”
The Bearcats held period leads of 2-0 and 3-0 on Wednesday in front of a crowd of 1,095 at the Community Credit Union Arena on their way to getting on even terms.
“It’s just getting interesting now,” said Evans. “We’re not getting too excited. We’ve done our job at home, so has our opponent … our team knows what we need to do. We’re competing against a very, very good team, but more importantly we’re competing against ourselves; we need to play our game to the best of our abil- ity, simple as that.”
Luke Macmillan opened the scoring at 3:56 of the first, as took a pass from Graham Rutledge and beat Mariners goaltender Leif Hertz to the stick side. Tyler Pyke fired a bullet high to the short side at 17:26 to make it 2-0 for the home side.
In the second, Truro’s Gavin Hart converted a power- play marker, while Karter Renouf also scored with the man-power advantage late in the third to ice it.
“I’m really proud of how they played,” Evans said. “They played as a group, they stuck together, they did everything I could ask them to do, now they need to keep doing it. I know if we take our foot off the pedal, I know what’s going to happen and it’s not going to be positive for us.”
The third period of Wednesday’s contest featured more than 100 minutes in penalties. The Mariners received the lion’s share of those infractions, including five 10-minute misconducts in the final stanza.
The Bearcats will attempt to do something tonight they haven’t done all season – win at the Mariners Centre. Yarmouth won all three regular season home games against Truro and is 2-0 in the post-season.
“You’ve got to remember, they’ve got a really good team,” said Evans. “They’ve been in the top 20 in Canada basically all season long and they’re good at home. We gotta find a way to break through that. If we don’t want our season to end we’re gonna have to find a way.”
Game 6 is Sunday in Truro at 7 p.m.