Petes slip to ninth in conference
Friday coaching change didn’t spark weekend turnaround
OTTAWA – The Peterborough Petes are now sitting outside of the playoff picture with 28 games to play.
A Friday coaching change didn’t produce a dramatic Saturday turnaround for the Petes. Playing their sixth game in 10 days and with one practice under interim head coach Andrew Verner it was probably too much to expect miracles.
What the Petes got was an honest effort in a 3-2 loss to the Ottawa 67’s in a matinee at TD Place. It snapped Ottawa’s four-game losing streak while extending the Petes’ winless skid to four and 10 losses in their last 11.
The Petes started the weekend in sixth place but after Sunday’s action they sit in ninth place tied with the eighth place Mississauga Steelheads with 35 points. Ottawa and the North Bay Battalion moved past the Petes on the weekend. The Petes have until Thursday to regroup when they host the Guelph Storm.
Quinn Yule broke a 2-2 tie 4:02 into the third period cashing in a Sam Bitten rebound. The Petes had chances to tie it. 67’s goalie Olivier Tremblay snared a tough Pavel Gogolev shot through traffic eight minutes into the third. Nick Robertson hit the crossbar on a Petes’ power play with five minutes left.
“I told the guys it was a step forward having a lead on the road with a pretty busy schedule and a couple of pretty busy days,” said Verner, who took over after Jody Hull was fired in his sixth season as head coach. “We’ll take a day off (Sunday) and have a full week of practice.”
The biggest thing the club needs to work on Verner said is their breakouts.
“We have to work on coming out of our zone with control of the puck,” he said. “We’ll do a bit of work on special teams.”
Verner felt there was a good attitude amongst the players.
“There was life on the bench especially when we tied it and went ahead,” he said. “There was a belief we could do it. Wellsy was really good. Every coach needs a goalie to do that. Was anything different? Some things weren’t. We still didn’t shoot enough and we got into a few longer D-zone sets where we couldn’t end their cycle.”
Veteran blue-liner Matt Timms said it’s been a lot for the players to absorb in a short period of time.
“It’s added a little bit of a different dynamic to our team just because we’ve all been through something together. It’s something a lot of us who have been around the Petes a while have never been through,” Timms said. “It’s a little bit of a change of atmosphere but not too much because it’s the same coaches who have been here from the beginning of the year. It’s pretty tough when you only have one day (to adjust) and we’d played five games in nine days. There wasn’t much time to change much.”
Captain Logan DeNoble said there were some minor changes by the coaches.
“There were some slight changes to some faceoff plays and breakout plays off faceoffs,” said DeNoble. “For the most part it felt like another hockey game. The players were the same as we would be any other game. We tried to help each other out communicating. I thought we played a pretty good game we just didn’t get the breaks and hit a couple of posts.”
The Petes got off to a slow start as Ottawa outshot them 12-5 in scoring the lone goal of the first period. Jacob Cascagnette dropped a pass to Sasha Chmelevski who fed Travis Barron who slipped the puck through Wells’s legs at 15:55.
The Petes had jump to start the second tying it at 3:22 as Zach Gallant carried the puck deep and dropped it to Gogolev who snapped a shot over Tremblay’s glove.
The Petes took the lead 2:48 later when Nick Isaacson finished Bobby Dow’s two-on-one pass. Wells made a tremendous kick save off Merrick RIppon with 3:28 left in the second but the rebound went to Austen Keating who banked the tying marker off the Petes’ goalie.