AUBURN — An early shorthanded goal set the bar high for Edward Little’s penalty kill Saturday night. And the Red Eddies gave themselves too many opportunities to try to meet that standard going forward.
While they didn’t get on the board a man down again, the Eddies’ special teams did play at a high level in a 4-0 win over Poland/Gray-New Gloucester at Norway Savings Bank Arena.
Max Giard scored the shorty 4:30 in and Cody Woodward added a power play goal as EL killed off nine Poland/Gray-NG power plays to win its seventh in a row.
“We really played our systems,” Giard said “We played the box. We tried to keep one guy on the puck, if not get the puck out of there.”
Devin Dumont stopped 15 shots for the shutout.
“Our penalty kill did pretty well tonight,” said EL coach Craig Latuscha, whose team stands 7-3 after starting the season 0-3. “We had all those penalties and it’s something we’re not used to. Some of them were good calls and some of them were ticky-tack calls. But the kids that I count on to kill penalties did and our goaltender played pretty well.”
The teams split seven penalties in the first period. EL turned its first into a lead when Matt Grenier stole the puck just inside his blue line and passed ahead to Giard on the right wing. Giard crossed the blue line and fired on Poland/Gray-NG goalie Nick Hemond, who couldn’t handle the puck with his glove and deflected it behind him into the net.
“Our team did a very good job of getting it out of the zone and I just tried to dump it on net,” Giard said. “We were very lucky it went in.”
EL’s luck continued when Cade Chapman’s shot screamed off the boards behind and to the right of Hemond, hit him in the back of the leg and into the net with five minutes left in the first.
A roughing penalty gave Poland/Gray-NG (3-7) a 5-on-3 for 1:28 early in the second period, but the 26ers didn’t take advantage of their best chance when Isaiah Dubois’ shot deflected off an EL stick and sat in the crease in front of Dumont for several seconds before the netminder spotted it and cleared it.
“We had opportunities. We had shots. But the bottom line is Devin had too easy looks at them,” 26ers coach Travis Jalbert said. “A couple bounces different and it’s a completely different hockey game. Losing Nevin (Rand, midway through the first period) early obviously affected our ability to run two sets of wings and two centers, so we had to narrow it down from there.”
Sedrick Simons (goal, assist) scored on a breakaway to make it 3-0 at 11:28 of the second. Simons then set up Woodward’s goal 18 seconds into a power play for the final goal.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
