Dickson’s hot hand sparks Roughnecks
Sniper counts six goals in big win as Riggers edge closer to playoffs
ROUGHNECKS 16 , SWARM 12
Curtis Dickson didn’t have Georgia on his mind. Just a win.
The hottest stick in the NLL helped provide exactly that Friday at the Infinite Energy Center, just outside of Atlanta, scoring six times and adding five helpers to lead the Calgary Roughnecks to a 16-12 win over the Georgia Swarm.
How to describe Dickson’s play lately? En fuego. It was the righty’s eighth effort of three or more goals this season, giving the sniper 19 goals in his past four games, as he’s now surpassed the 40-goal plateau for a fourthstraight year.
“You get into a groove. Sometimes the ball is dropping for you and sometimes it’s not,” Dickson said. “It’s a testament to the guys around me. As cliché as it sounds, they’re finding me in open spots and lucky enough the ball’s going in the net for me.”
Dickson’s 44 goals on the season have him four back of the Buffalo Bandits’ Dhane Smith for the league lead and in the thick of the MVP conversation.
“You could give him the game ball after every game — that’s how good he is,” Roughnecks captain Mike Carnegie said. “He could be the MVP, he could be the first star after every single game. It’s like, when’s it going to end?”
Dane Dobbie scored four times and chipped in five assists, while Jeff Shattler and Wesley Berg both scored twice to supplement Dickson’s dominance.
Dickson was a terror all night long, scoring three times in the first quarter, once in the second, once in the third and again in the fourth.
“He draws so much attention,” Carnegie said of Dickson. “As the game wears on, you can kind of see, ‘ Where’s Curtis? Where’s Curtis?’ and then Dobbie can flip in there or Shattler can flip in there or Reilly O’Connor’s getting looks. Having Dickson score all those goals early, it freed up the other guys late in the game because they’ve, obviously, been told to key on Dickson.”
Winners of three in a row — it’s the first time since February of 2014 that has happened — Dickson & Co. starting to look like a threat rather than a young team in the middle of a rebuild.
The win gives the Roughnecks (6-7) a chance to get back to the .500 mark for the first time since the end of the 2014 season on Saturday at the Pepsi Center against the Colorado Mammoth (7 p.m., TSN Go).
“That’s huge,” Dickson said. “It was a bit of an ugly one, but sometimes you’ve got to win those games against a scrappy team like that, that likes to run the ball. That’s a big win for us to come back and get a chance to get back to .500 here. We’ll carry that momentum into (Saturday) night and keep playing like we are.”
With five games to go in the regular season, a win over the Mam- moth would also pull the Roughnecks to within two games of the West Division co-leaders Colorado (8-3) and the Saskatchewan Rush (8-3).
Combined with the Vancouver Stealth’s 17-10 loss to the Buffalo Bandits on Friday, the Roughnecks now have a two-and-a-half game cushion on the Stealth for the third and final playoff spot in the west.
For a while, it looked like the Roughnecks were going to be heading into Saturday’s Rocky Mountain Rivalry facing the prospect of a disappointing 0-2 weekend.
The Swarm were led by Chad Tutton and Shayne Jackson hat tricks, but Georgia’s offence dried up in the second half as they could only muster four goals after taking an 8-6 lead into the break.
Roughnecks goaltender Mike Poulin, who came into the game leading the league in both goalsagainst average and save percentage, gave up for 11 goals in 43 minutes and was pulled in favour of Frankie Scigliano late in the third quarter with the Swarm leading 11-8.
It ended up being the turning point.
From there, the Roughnecks found a sense of urgency and reeled off eight straight to build up a 1611 lead with three minutes to go in the game.
Scigliano stopped nine of the 10 shots he faced.
“I think three times in that game we were down by three goals,” Carnegie said. “For Mike to hang in there, we didn’t give him a lot of opportunities to make great saves. Obviously, Frankie came in and shut the door and, I think, that’s what you need out of a team — you can win those ugly games.”