Americans upend Monsters, 7-3

The Monsters are a young team still getting to know each other, and unfortunately for them, that was evident in their season opener on Feb. 12.

The Monsters played with energy and energized the 2,720 fans in Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse in the first period. They jumped out to a 2-0 lead on goals by veterans Nathan Zerbe and Zac Dalpe, but after that it was all Rochester in a 7-3 rout by the Americans.

“You look at the shots, 4634, 46 as a positive,” Coach Mike Eaves said. “We want to have a shooter’s mentality team. We want to have

over 30 shots a game. We accomplished that. Unfortunately, the breakdowns we had were high grade. And the shots they made were some pretty good shots. That was the difference in the game.”

The Monsters were scheduled to open the season last weekend in Rockford, but those games were postponed because COVID-19 concerns made the Monsters unable to travel. Rochester played two games in the opening weekend.

The Monsters had no preseason games to get ready. They could scrimmage in practice, but those are not game-like conditions.

Rochester scored three unanswered goals in the second period to take a 3-2 lead.

The Monsters tied it on a blast by Dillon Simpson at 15:29 of the middle frame, but Rochester scored on the power play before the middle period ended and then added two more in the third before finishing the scoring on an empty-netter with 1:47 to play.

The good news is the Monsters cannot stew about losing to Rochester for long. They get right back at it at 4 p.m. Feb. 13 when they host the Grand Rapids Griffins.

“We don’t know our kids very well,” Eaves admitted. “Now the rubber has hit the road. We’ll look at how the young defensemen played and the forwards. We won’t overload them too much with information (from the Rochester game) because we want to get them ready for our next opponent.”

Eaves said corrections will be made in practice next week.

“It starts for us now,” Eaves said. “In some ways we did some good things and in others we didn’t. At the end of the day we lost, and that’s never much fun.”

Brad Thiessen stopped 27 of the 33 shots he faced. The Monsters were 1 of 6 on the power play. The Americans were 2 of 3 with the man advantage.