Soo Thunderbirds coach Pat Carricato is fond of telling me how much his team likes playing in the cozy confines of John Rhodes Community Centre.
Little wonder.
The West Division-leading Thunderbirds have the best home record in the eight-team Northern Ontario Jr. Hockey League to date, having posted a 17-1-3 mark.
The Thunderbirds don’t draw big crowds at the Rhodes with an average attendance of just over 200 (plus another 50 or so who watch from above in Brody’s Sports Bar) but the close quarters of the facility certainly seem to work to the advantage of the home team.
Not to call the Thunderbirds homers though.
The Birds have an 8-8 road record and coupled with their home performance, have opened an eight-point lead over the second-place Soo Eagles and are 11 points up on the third-ranked Blind River Beavers on the NOJHL’s West side.
Not normally a team that adds players once the season starts, the Birds did address a few needs recently by signing free-agent goalie Eric Pye and bringing well-travelled forward Pier Paul Landry back to the NOJHL.
The arrival of Pye has relieved some of the pressure off of second-year goalie Ryan McDonald, who has experienced hot and cold extremes between the Soo pipes this season.
The speedy Landry, meanwhile, gives the Birds some veteran depth up front.
AROUND THE NOJHL
First-place Abitibi and second-place North Bay are putting distance between themselves and the third-seeded Sudbury Jr. Wolves and the last-place Temiscaming Royals in the East Division. The Eskimos won two of three games on a weekend road trip to the Michigan Soo, Blind River and the Canadian Soo while the Trappers are 8-1-1 in their last 10 outings…After winning 10 straight games, Blind River dropped three in a row last week and was outscored 13-3 in the process. The latest setback was a listless 4-1 loss to North Bay on Sunday night which prompted sports editor Ken Pagan to note in today’s edition of the North Bay Nugget (nugget.ca) that Blind River certainly didn’t look like a team that just recently had put together a 10-game winning streak.
Dudley in the Igloo
Wow must have really hit a nerve
I have never made excuses for the Birds when they have lost and if you read I was one of the first to congratulate the Isles the other night .
As for the NB game I was asking if the Birds got off the Bus in NB.
playing the last game of a 3 game trip won’t happen talk to your buddy Blanchard he would never let that happen
Well am I mistaken or are the TBirds undefeated in January with Pye in the net? Nothing against any of the teams or goalies but the TBirds are the team (with Pye in the net) to beat. Then AE with Davey and Eagles with JK (though Doan has some super moments). Just a humble goalie follower. Polite question to birdwatch will the coach ride Pye through the playoffs or not since they get an automatic bid?
I’ll let you know on Thursday!!
Dodley:
We’ll just wait and see “IF” the Eskis make it to the Dudley how well they’ll do. Your team carries an air compressor around with them to inflate their fat heads. Hmmmm I wonder how they get on the bus !
Just posted on OspreyBlogs.com:
A SHORT LIST OF FAVOURITE NOJHLERS
RR
brother 99
You are correct
Upfront- No axe to grind with any team as I am just a fan of the NOJHL for scouting players. Just made a comment based on the fact that the Eskis did not look like themselves in that game and couldn’t jump out ahead despite the T-Birds starting very slow. By second period I thought the T-Birds were totally outplaying the Eskis. I heard that the Eskis had a bit of a wild night so I attribute some of their lag to two previous tough games and a stupid night of partying. Not taking anything away from the T-Birds. Now that you have goaltending, you have a solid team. I like a lot of the T-Bird players.
Eskimos stick it to Trappers
Posted By JORDAN ERCIT, THE NUGGET
Source for Sports had quite the stick sale going on Sunday.
Four free goals for every 20 sticks sold.
A bus loading snafu left the Abitibi Eskimos without their trusty collection of composite sticks, but they still managed to put the lumber to the North Bay Trappers Sunday with an efficient 4-1 victory at Memorial Gardens.
At $40 a pop, the NOJHL league leaders loaded up at the nearby Source for Sports on Fisher Street with just 20 new wooden twigs for 16 skaters, leaving little leeway in case a few were broken on the plain of battle. They left town with all 20 afterwards.
“I don’t know how we did it, but we forgot to load our sticks onto the bus,” said Eskimos forward Joshua Clancy, who along with his teammates is responsible for loading the team bus. “We all went to the Source for Sports and bought a $40 wooden stick, put it on the coach’s credit card and now we owe him 40 bucks.
“I haven’t used a wooden stick since I was eight years old. They don’t shoot the same, they don’t feel the same. So tonight we just wanted to keep it simple and not dipsy-doodle, just shoot the puck and crash the net for rebounds.”
Yet it was the same old result.
Eddie Davey continued to vex the Trappers with his seventh win in eight contests while Clancy scored twice, including the game winner, and was set up each time by league-leading scorer Marc-Alain Begin, who made his first appearance at Memorial Gardens after a 13-game stint in the QMJHL.
“He’s an amazing player and he has an amazing drive and I wasn’t expecting him to come back,” Clancy said of Begin.
“I was pumped. I jumped 10 feet high (when he found out Begin was coming back).”
Riley Currie and Matt St. Jacques also scored for the Eskimos (30-7-2) in a game featuring two of the hottest teams in the NOJHL. Sacha Guimond replied for the Trappers (24-12-2) on a precision shot from the point during a power play.
And while the Eskimos looked like a team that has gone 9-1-0 in their last 10 games, the Trappers, who lost for just the second time in regulation since the start of December, seem to have lost their way a little bit, reaching back to a sloppy 8-5 victory in Temiscaming Thursday.
Head coach Ian Swalucynski said some of the bad habits that surfaced in that game and beyond stuck around for the Sunday tilt with Abitibi.
“There’s lot to work on,” Swalucynski said, citing improvement in his team’s defensive play, positioning and physicality. “It’s good that it happened though. We’ve got to work and be ready for practice. Listen and learn so we don’t pull stuff out of our butts and hope it works.
“Things work for a reason and guys got to buy in and do it. We haven’t done that the last three games and it bit us in the rear end tonight.”
It also put plenty of space between the second-place Trappers and the first-place Eskimos in the battle for the East Division crown. The Trappers need to make up 12 points on Abitibi with 12 games remaining in the regular season.
But forward Dan Frawley was not about to concede the division to the rival Eskimos.
“With the way they’re playing it’s going to be hard but we don’t have to look at it like that,” he said. “We just have to focus on winning our game every game we play.
“You never know what can happen. Injuries can happen, you just never know what to expect really.”
On the injury front, the Trappers had Justin Dicks (personal), Morgan Rudiger (personal) and Jese Cere (root canal) back in the lineup.
Stan Smrke (upper body) was still out of the lineup while the Eskimos were missing head coach Paul Gagne, who was recovering from surgery.
Saturday, the shorthanded Temiscaming Royals were up 3-2 on the Eskimos after 40 minutes before Abitibi responded with four unanswered goals in the third period for a 6-3 win at Jus Jordan Arena in Iroquois Falls.
Benoit Gauthier had four assists for the Eskimos, Begin and Michael Robert had a pair of goals each and Davey made 24 saves for the win. Clancy and Michael Fecteau also scored.
Cedric Boutin had a hand in all three Temiscaming goals, scoring twice, Andre Leclair had a goal and an assist and Jim Murray made 31 saves in the loss for the Royals (11-24-2), who dressed 13 skaters.
Davey sets single-season record for victories
Posted By VINCENT MAN, THE DAILY PRESS
In the process of helping the Abitibi Eskimos beat the North Bay Trappers last night, Eddie Davey set a new record.
The netminder’s 33-save performance in a 4-1 win earned him his 29th victory of the season, a new benchmark in the Northern Ontario Junior Hockey League.
“I didn’t go into tonight thinking about it at all, but it was in my mind with five minutes left,” Davey said. “I was definitely pretty stoked about that.
“I was just going shot by shot. I was going with the process rather than thinking about the win.”
To make things sweeter, Davey was named the game’s first star. The only blip on the radar came in the form of a power-play goal scored by Sacha Guimond.
Davey has a record of 29-4-2 this season. Aside from leading the league in wins, he is also tops in save percentage and goals-against averaging, sporting numbers of 0.928 and 2.47, respectively, in 35 games. He also has a shutout to his credit.
The previous record of 28 wins was held by Sebastien Laplante. He set that mark with the Rayside-Balfour Sabrecats in 2001-02.
Davey now has more than a month of games to inflate the record.
Providing the offence for Abitibi last night in North Bay were Matt St. Jacques, Riley Currie and Josh Clancy, who netted two markers.
The four goals came amidst a “stick controversy.”
“We kind of forgot them,” Davey said.
“We went out and got some wooden sticks. In warm-ups we were missing the net.”
Though setting a record doesn’t happen every game, Davey laughingly said that winning the way they did topped his personal achievement.
“I think with the wooden sticks, it was a pretty sweet victory.”
Still atop the league, the Eskis have a record of 30-7-2.
The sight of black and gold must make the Trappers sick to their stomachs.
Not only do they trail the Eskis in the Eastern Division, but the Trappers have won just twice in nine games between the two teams this season.
North Bay was the hottest team entering play last night with just one loss in its last 10 games. That single loss came at the hands of the Eskis.
Luckily, the Trappers will only have to put up with Abitibi once more before the postseason begins. They will travel to Iroquois Falls for a match on Feb. 23.
The Eskis were also in action on Saturday night in Iroquois Falls. Benoit Gauthier recorded four assists and was named the game’s first star in a 6-3 victory over the Temiscaming Royals.
Three of Gauthier’s points came during a four-goal third period for the Eskis. Temiscaming, which held three different leads throughout the match, entered the third period up by one, but soon found itself trailing by one following a pair of Abitibi power-play goals. The home team added two more to put the game out of reach.
Marc-Alain Begin and Michael Robert each scored twice for the Eskis. Michael Fecteau and Clancy also scored in the win.
Cedric Boutin had two goals for the Royals, while Andre Leclair rounded out the scoring.
The Eskis’ schedule this week consists of only one game. They will host the Blind River Beavers on Saturday night.
Hi folks, as noted earlier, a new Blog has been posted, if you all want to move on to that one.
Thanks!
RR
RR, please email me