Bulldogs make some noise of their own
Those who have never attended a Hamilton Bulldogs School Day Game might have heard it gets loud. Which is accurate. Sort of.
It’s loud in the same way lighting a firecracker in your ear is loud. The same way living next door to a Hells Angels motorcycle repair shop is loud. This is volume as a three-dimensional object. If the annual game was a social media message, it would be all in caps.
Put 11,500 elementary and middle school students in a confined space and tell them to go crazy and you reach levels of noise generally found only in AC/DC’s dreams. When the boys cheered, you could feel your spleen vibrate. When the girls were told to scream, well, it’s honestly a miracle the players’ visors didn’t shatter. It was the kind of auditory detonation that could pierce Kevlar and make daycare workers dream of the comparative quiet of a room-wide tantrum.
The thing is, this game was significant for reasons beyond the big crowd and the energy in the building. The 3-2 overtime victory is exactly the kind of tight, low-scoring game the Bulldogs have had a terrible time winning this season.
After a bonkers opening stretch in which the Hamilton offence was doing a pretty solid impression of the 1980s Edmonton Oilers — in its first seven games it scored 7,7,5, 6, 4, 5 and 7 goals — it’s come back to earth. In its first 10 games, it scored 48 goals. Over the next 10, it collected just 28.
That’s hardly surprising since that kind of output wasn’t sustainable. Those first 48 goals put them on pace for 326 over the course of the season which would’ve been more prolific than last year’s London Knights with Mitch Marner, Matthew Tkachuk and Christian Dvorak, who are all in the National Hockey League today.
The Bulldogs are getting better, for sure, but nobody’s comparing them with that crop just yet. Especially since they’ve been without their No. 1 centre and their top offensive threat for a bit because of injuries.
Anyway, in those first 10 highflying games they were 7-3.
In the next nine (prior to Wednesday) they went 3-6. In that stretch — giving up the same number of goals as before — they were just 1-4 in one-goal games and an ugly 1-6 in games they scored three or fewer. “Teams start to buckle down,” coach John Gruden says.
So they have to find a way to win when the goals aren’t flowing, which is likely to be the norm going forward. Teams aren’t just going to let them run wild anymore. They’ll have to grind out victories and steal two points the hard way. Playoff hockey style. This was a start.
What fans now hope is that this 20th game of the year is a launching pad. While the offence isn’t going to return to its silly ways, the league’s second-worst penalty kill does have to improve considerably. The middle-of-the-pack power play has to get much better. Close games must be won at least as often as not.
It’s going to take some time. This is still a youthful team. The youngest player is only two years older than some of the middle schoolers who were in the stands on Wednesday. Getting everything pointed in the right direction is what this season is all about.
In a convenient setup for grading purposes, the team gets to blow out its eardrums again 31 games from now when a second School Day Game will be played. That’s nearly half a season away and provides a convenient milepost. It’ll be a chance to hold up the mid-November Bulldogs to the mid-February Bulldogs and see if they have indeed taken a few big steps forward.
And, if things go really well, the folks in the building Wednesday will be able to hear again normally by then.