Ronnie’s Ice was fantastic this week; the perfect winter time scenario. There were only 7 players, plus Tommy and Ronnie (so that’s 8 skaters for scrimmage plus Tommy in net). For the drills we did a short ice game to work on positioning and passing. It was a 3-on-4 scenario. I didn’t play well here, somewhat because my brain just wasn’t firing fast enough yet and neither was my body. By the scrimmage though I was fully functional. We did 3-on-3 half ice, with just one person on the bench to sub. I was on a team with Roman, Joe and David (so it was an Ordinals reunion) against Ronnie, William, Jeremy and a guy whose name I don’t know. Midway through Ronnie took Roman to his team and gave us the mystery guy. One of the things I love about this setup is you get to play defense and offense throughout the game, and you can go from one to the other very quickly. I did pretty well on both sides. My defense held up pretty well, even getting the puck off Ronnie once and messing up his plays a couple times. I also scored a hat trick! I was exhausted when it was over, but also very satisfied.
The night games opened well with a 5-1 Tigers win against the Rockets. This was one of the best Tigers games I’ve ever seen. The amount of aggressive forechecking and backchecking was awesome. I didn’t get to make any rushes in this game because I couldn’t find an open lane, but I did pick up two assists. Hopefully the Tigers will keep up this aggressiveness through the rest of the season!
The Ordinals game was another massacre. We’d been nailed a couple week’s ago against the Hornets and this week it was the Canucks that obliterated us. They weren’t doing anything special, just basic hockey played well. We had a lot of positional issues on defense. Plus they are a fast team and not everyone can keep up with them. To our credit we did keep fighting to score, right down to the final buzzer and that I was happy to see. The final score was still difficult though: I’m not even sure what it was… before the end of the second the scoreboard showed 0-9 and after that the score didn’t go up anymore and the clock went into runtime. I figure we ended at 12 or 13 to zero. I’ll know for sure when Sky Rink updates their site. It looks like the loss will drop us from 4th to 5th place, if I’ve accounted for everything correctly.
Meanwhile, while the Ordinals were getting killed; the Wizards were on the other rink beating the Sled Dogs with a 4-2 score.
Next week the Ordinals and Wizards both play, but again it’s an Ordinals only week since the two games are at the same time.