Reinvented Keating keeps his hot hand
OHL scoring leader piles up three assists in 67’s fifth straight win
The last time Austen Keating found his name in the conversation about a league scoring title was in his minor midget season with the Guelph Jr. Gryphons, a month before the Ottawa 67’s made him the 16th-overall pick in the 2015 Ontario Hockey League draft.
Keating recalls well how he finished second to Brady Gilmour, now a Detroit Red Wings prospect who plays for the Saginaw Spirit.
Eleven games into his fourth season with the 67’s, though, Keating was atop the Ontario Hockey League scoring race after his third three-point game of the season — all assists — in a 5-3 victory over the Erie Otters in front of 2,583 at TD Place arena on Sunday afternoon.
It was the fifth consecutive win for the 67’s, who are now 8-3-0.
So the new week begins with Keating having three goals and 16 assists, while Tye Felhaber has 11 goals and seven assists and the third member of that line, rookie Marco Rossi, charging hard with seven goals, all in the last five games, and five assists.
Maybe even more impressive is Keating ’s plus-14 rating.
“A lot of it has to go to my linemates,” Keating said after assisting on two goals by Felhaber and one by Rossi on Sunday.
“It’s really just the little things. But what’s making us so much better is that our defensive game is so much better. Now we just have to keep it going.
“We had a rocky start with the 10 players away (at NHL training camps), but we have all cylinders going now.”
Keating put up respectable totals of 13 goals and 19 assists as a 16-year-old OHL rookie and he followed that up with 22 goals and 41 assists.
He hit a little bit of a speed bump in his third year despite scoring 24 times as part of his 52 points, before reinventing himself over the summer while working out with NHLers Tanner Pearson and Mark Scheifele.
His improved production mirrors that of the 67’s overall.
A season ago, their longest winning streak was six games. They could match and improve on that in their upcoming road trip comprising games at Niagara, Erie and Mississauga starting on Thursday night.
Graeme Clarke got them on the board Sunday at the 3:19 mark of the first period and Felhaber made it 2-1 after Erie answered with the first of two goals by Kyle Maksimovich.
Maksimovich struck again nearing the midway point of the second period, again tying the contest, before Rossi scored at 18:30 to give the 67’s the lead for good.
Sasha Chmelevski made it 4-2 at 1:10 into the third.
Erie’s Alex Gritz kept the end
result in doubt with a goal at 15:43 before Felhaber clinched it at 19:24, scoring into an empty net while sliding on his rear end.
“I liked the way we played (Sunday),” 67’s head coach André Tourigny said. “Sure, we made some mistakes, but I liked our thought process.
“The expectations for this team are high on the inside and the outside and we’re really happy with everyone focused. We didn’t go out and think we had just won four in a row. We were focused on going out and playing really well.”