“It’s a 60 minute game and unfortunately our guys forgot that and showed up for about 35 of it,” said Storm Head Coach Lee Stone in his post-game comments following a 2-1 loss to the Nanaimo Buccaneerson Thursday.
He added, “For the 35 minutes, we were really good but for the rest of the game, I think we let Nanaimo take it to us.”
Despite outshooting the Buccaneers last Thursday, the Storm fell to their North division rivals. Nanaimo rookie netminder Derek Krall was magnificent, turning aside 34 of 35 shots. The Storm’s lone goal came off the stick of Brett Kinley reacting to a rebound from a Reid Lindsay blast that was tipped along the way by Darren Hards.
Heading into Friday night, the Storm were clearly disappointed in their road performance and took it out on visiting Peninsula. Offensively they were impressive, skating to a 10-0 victory over the Panthers.
The Storm, despite their great early season record, have been struggling on specialty teams ranked number six with the extra skater (in a nine team league) and number eight on the kill. Friday night, they went 1/7 on the power play and successfully killed their only penalty of the night.
This was the first meeting between the two teams since Peninsula became the first and only Junior team west of Ontario to adopt full facial shields. There were a number of high hits and aggressive play before and after whistles that kept veteran referee Steve Brown and his crew busy.
Spencer Deakin earned his second shutout of the season and lowered his goals-against average to 1.71 while maintaining a healthy .929 save percentage; that’s good enough for second behind Krall from Nanaimo.
Campbell River goals came from Kinley (2), Lindsay (2), Ryan MacDonald, Ethan Schmunk, Noah Fladager, Jalen Price, Ryan Butler and Jonathan Lee.
In other Storm news; Cole Slaney is back with the team after 36 games in the BCHL with Alberni Valley and the club has another goaltender in town with the arrival of Nate Reinhart. Reinhart has played Midget AAA in Edmonton for the past three years, sporting an average save percentage of .920 through 58 games.
There are two games scheduled this week for the Black and Red. Wednesday night they meet Trevor Bottomley and the Westshore Wolves down in Colwood while on Friday they host Chase Anderson and the first place Kerry Park Islanders.