What a difference a week makes.
After the less than stellar games this week, and my less than stellar performance in them, this week saw some excellent things going on.
The Tigers started the night against the Scapegoats, the number one team in the division and a team we’ve never beaten. Last night we finally did, winning 5-4! We played a solid game and our efforts were helped by the Scapegoats having a understaffed bench. Things got dramatic in the last couple minutes when we were winning 5-2. I thought I’d cleared the puck from out offensive zone, but apparently not and it left me out of position to help stop a rush, so that made the score 5-3. Then right after that the back door was left open and another goal scored, getting to 5-4. Luckily Gregg kept control of the puck after that and prevented a tie-up, giving us a solid, regulation win. Yay us!
The Wizards also had a good night. While we didn’t beat the Tsunami, we did pick up a point in the standings as we lost in overtime by a score of 3-2. Tsunami always gives us a tough game and last night was no exception, but we played the best we have in weeks and generated a lot of solid plays and it was great to see. We came so close to tying it up to pull in to overtime too, but that wasn’t meant to be. If we can play like this more often we can turn the back half of our season around.
As for myself, I was happy I recovered from my own crap play of last week. In the morning I played good for Ronnie’s. In small games I got two in the top corners of the shooter tutor, which is something I’ve never been able to do. The first I thought was a fluke, but I did it again a few minutes after the first. During scrimmage I also had a couple shots that were up higher than usual. It’d be great if my shot was going through a transition where I’d get the puck higher. I’m excited to see how this evolves over the coming weeks. During the night games, I was satisfied with my defensive play (except for the aforementioned Tigers failed clear). I had a couple gaps in the Wizards game in terms of proper coverage, but luckily none of that translated to a goal against. I also had some frustration on the bench that I’m going to have to decide how to deal with going forward because that cast a pall of irritation over the game.