Hitmen fall to Giants in shootout

Nobody could have blamed the Calgary Hitmen for looking a little lethargic on Monday afternoon.

They were taking to the ice for their fifth game in seven days, after all, and hadn’t had much time to recover from Sunday afternoon’s New Year’s Day overtime loss to the Edmonton Oil Kings.

So when the Hitmen (14-173-1) gave up a two-goal lead in the dying minutes of their Monday afternoon tilt with the Vancouver Giants (14-20-1-2) and then lost 5-4 in a shootout, they easily could have pointed to the WHL schedule makers as an excuse.

That’s not what the Hitmen did, though.

“No, I don’t think we can use that as an excuse,” said Hitmen forward Matteo Gennaro, who scored two goals and added two assists. “If you watch the game from start to finish, I think we controlled the pace of the game the whole 60 minutes and I thought we forechecked very well and had a lot of offensive-zone time and created a lot more chances than they did.”

It was a particularly frustrating loss for the Hitmen, who did get the better of the Giants for large portions of the game.

Neither team could capitalize on opportunities in the first period, but a 50-second mental lapse by the Hitmen early in the second stanza saw goals from Ty Ronning and Tyler Benson put the Giants ahead.

Jakob Stukel and Gennaro both scored before the end of the middle frame to even things up by intermission.

Gennaro and Beck Malenstyn found the back of the net to give the Hitmen a 4-2 lead early in the third period.

That should have been it. The Hitmen were ahead with momentum on their side — in front of a home crowd, too — but somehow it all fell apart.

“Being up 4-2 in the third period and giving up that lead and them coming back and capitalizing, it’s tough,” Stukel said, before agreeing with Gennaro that the physical demands of playing so many games in such a short period wasn’t a factor. “I think it’s just a lack of kind of competing after goals. We were up 4-2 and that’s the time when you want to really take advantage of it and keep our momentum, but I think we kind of sat back a little bit and they capitalized on it.

“Playing five games in seven days is obviously tough, but we’ve got to find ways to take care of our bodies and be ready for the game.”

Making the loss even more frustrating is the fact that, in the five games the Hitmen have played since the Christmas break, they’ve only come away with one victory.

Every game has been close, though, and they have now dropped points in two shootouts, as well as Sunday’s overtime loss to the Oil Kings. Their other loss was a one-goal defeat at the hands of the Medicine Hat Tigers, one of the WHL’s elite teams.

With the Hitmen currently on the outside looking in at the WHL’s playoff bracket, they need to start turning some of those close games into wins. They left Monday’s tilt feeling as if they had blown a golden opportunity to pick up points off a team that’s even further back in the standings than they are.

“I think we just took our foot off the gas a bit and it just bit us in the butt,” Malenstyn said. “It was mental lapses. We train three or four months in the offseason to be able to handle a schedule like this.”

The Hitmen will now have a couple days to rest up before returning to the ice on Friday for an away game against the Regina Pats.