Blazers take growl out of Bruins

By GREGG DRINNAN
Daily News Sports Editor
The move that may mean the most to the fortunes of the latest edition of the Kamloops Blazers wasn’t made on the ice Saturday night.
Rather, it was made in head coach Barry Smith’s office prior to the team’s WHL regular-season home-opener, a game in which the Blazers handily defeated the Chilliwack Bruins 4-2 in front of 4,583 fans at Interior Savings Centre.
Prior to the game, the decision was made to scratch defenceman Linden Saip, 18, and insert Curtis Kulchar, a 19-year-old who didn’t play in Friday’s 4-3 season-opening victory in Chilliwack. Sophomore Brandon Underwood, 17, sat out both games.
“Good is not good enough here anymore,” Smith said in explaining the decision to scratch Saip. “You have to be great to stay in the lineup. We didn’t have the luxury last season of having depth. This season we do. You have to earn your right to stay in every night.
“There was no message sent there, other than he didn’t play that well and the other guy bumped him out.”
What has allowed Smith the luxury of making moves such as this has been the play of Tyler Hansen, a 16-year-old freshman from Magrath, Alta., who was the 66th selection in the 2008 bantam draft.
Scratching Hansen, Smith said, would have been a “real easy thing to do, but he was one of our best guys (Friday). I don’t look at age.”
Hansen, one of eight defencemen on the roster, has been good enough that he has found himself taking a regular shift and playing specialty teams, as have freshman forwards Dylan Willick, who was terrific Saturday, and JC Lipon.
Willick “was really good on all specialty teams and five-on-five,” Smith said. “He’s like (forward Shayne Wiebe). He does all the things both ways. Most nights when you do that you’re going to be a pretty good hockey player.”
For about 50 minutes Saturday, the Blazers had a lot of pretty good players. For all but the first half of the second period, the Blazers were the better team.
As Smith explained: “We were really great when our (defencemen) were going two or three strides and then moving the puck . . . our forwards get it, two or three strides, moving the puck.
“For 12 minutes we quit moving our feet and you’re not successful when you’re standing still.”
Those 12 minutes followed a first period in which the Blazers outshot the visitors 21-7 and outscored them 3-0, getting three power-play goals in the last four minutes.
“They were undisciplined penalties,” said Marc Habscheid, the former Blazers head coach who now is the Bruins’ general manager and head coach. “We deserved them. (They were) careless penalties and that’s not how our team wants to play. We want to be solid between the whistles and play a good, honest, hard game with none of those undisciplined penalties.”
Jimmy Bubnick, Tyler Shattock and C.J. Stretch, three Kamloops veterans, made the Bruins pay for their sins with those first-period goals.
The line of Stretch between Shayne Wiebe and Shattock was too much for the Bruins to handle at times; in fact, the first-period score would have been worse had Wiebe not shot high and wide of an open side and later been stymied by goaltender Lucas Gore, who faced 35 shots.
“We’ve got a lot of speed up front,” said Shattock, who finished with two goals and an assist. He has five points in two games. “There aren’t a lot of defences in this league that will be able to handle us down low.”
Shattock also liked his team’s solid start, something that plagued the Blazers last season.
“That’s a good sign for us to come out like that,” he said. “We had that 10 minutes in the second period where we kind of let up, but other than that I thought we played a good solid game.”
Habscheid, for one, wasn’t putting a whole lot of stock in his club’s play in the first half of the second period.
“It’s easy to play when you’re down that far,” he said. “The other team lets off the gas and you pick it up.”
Ryan Howse, at 8:41 of the second period, and Chris Collins, with 8.1 seconds left in the third period, were the Bruins to beat Kamloops goaltender Jon Groenheyde, who finished with 27 saves.
“I liked Jonny tonight,” Smith said. “He made a real big save at 2-0. He made a great save, we go down and make it 3-0. That’s a big turning point in the game.”
JUST NOTES: Referees Devin Klein and Colby Smith gave the Bruins 13 of 21 minors. . . . The Blazers were 4-for-10 on the power play; the Bruins were 1-for-5.
gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca
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