North Stars penalty kill struggles in loss to Millionaires

“It’s a killer,” Bedford said on Monday about his team’s inconsistency so far this season, as the North Stars have a 4-3-0 record. “Yesterday I finally felt that we had come together as a team and had a good game plan in place … [but today] we just couldn’t kill off penalties. I don’t know one guy that blocked a shot on a penalty kill and I don’t know that we stopped more than three pucks on a penalty kill. You’re not going to win games if you can’t kill off penalties.”

Before all the (lack of) penalty killing in Monday’s matinee, the North Stars looked primed to build off of their strong performance the night before.

Reed Delainey got things started seven minutes into the game with a snipe to the top corner glove side. Several minutes later, Connor Logan crushed a shot of his own past goaltender Colby Entz to give the North Stars a 2-0 lead.

But the second period was when things unravelled quickly.

A tripping call on Ryan Rosenberg, followed by a slash on Kendall Fransoo, followed by a boarding penalty on Cody Spagrud, led to three straight power play goals just 1:16 apart.

Cole Bryks, Curran Reeve and Tucker Scantlebury’s consecutive goals deflated the North Stars but after 40 minutes they weren’t even out of it, trailing by just one goal.

“That’s what we explained to them [at intermission],” Bedford said. “It wasn’t like they played awful. It was just that we took bad penalties and they capitalized on them.”

The North Stars couldn’t muster enough offence in the third and ended up taking two penalties in the final three minutes. That’s when Millionaire winger Keegan Milligan put the game away for good, netting his squad’s fourth power play goal of the game.

“It was a little bit of a role reversal from when we played Battlefords on Wednesday,” Millionaires head coach Devin Windle said after his team improved to 3-3-0. “[Today] we were the one with the 5-on-3s and ultimately our power play did the job. We needed them to come up big because we were flat in the early going.”

He was very pleased with his team’s resiliency in coming back from a two-goal deficit.

“We’ve preached work ethic, work ethic, work ethic and I’m very, very happy,” Windle said. “To be down 2-0, you need a work ethic to get back in and we had it tonight.”

Heading into the showcase, the Millionaires were just 1-3-0, but now they’re just one point back of division leader Estevan.

Meanwhile, the poor North Stars penalty killing translated into missing key saves at key times from Ryan Rewerts.

In the second period, the Millionaires may have scored three goals on three power play opportunities, but they also only had six shots on goal all period. The final shot tally was 26-20 in favour of Battlefords.

“You need to find a way to make a big stop and we didn’t see it,” Bedford said. “It’s frustrating because I think the world of all three of our goalies but when they’re not able to look like a number one, it frustrates me.”

Rewerts is 0-2 this season with a 4.23 goals-against-average and .833 save percentage.

Moving forward, Bedford also mentioned there were selfish plays he will address this coming week ahead of Saturday’s tilt in Melfort against the Mustangs.

“There’s some things that we need to talk about in regards to discipline and selfishness,” Bedford said. “We did some things today that were really self-centred and I didn’t like that.”

Saturday’s game can be heard live on CJNB/CJNS, with the Ultra Print pre-game show getting started at 7:15 p.m.

Nathan Kanter is battlefordsNOW’s sports reporter and voice of the Battlefords North Stars. He can be reached at Nathan.kanter@jpbg.ca or tweet him @NathanKanter11

by Nathan Kanter

North Stars penalty kill struggles in loss to Millionaires

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