By: Daniel Vazzoler
After starting their season with three straight wins, the Carleton Place Canadians are now in the midst of a three-game losing streak following Friday’s 2-1 loss to the Rockland Nationals.
Carleton Place should have been a confident team after ending the showcase weekend with consecutive 6-1 wins over the Nepean Raiders and Cornwall Colts – two lowly teams to start this season – but it’s beginning to look like the confidence is turning into cockiness.
However, the wins aren’t there to support that and Canadians coach Jason Clarke said he saw things on Friday that aren’t helping change things around.
“Just not a lot of effort, not a lot of compete, not a lot of battles to win one-on-ones or to take pucks into dirty areas to create scoring chances. I mean, everything was to the outside and everything was soft.”
The Canadians played that way in the first period, but came out of it unscathed as goalie Connor Murphy stopped all 12 shots he faced in an opening frame that took Carleton Place nearly 9:30 to get its first registered shot.
Clarke said he liked the way his team played in the second period – for the most part.
“Second period we played hard and dominated the period but one mistake gets in the back of our net.”
The one mistake sent William Collins and Benjamin Pruneau on a 2-on-1 rush for the Nationals. Collins had the puck on the left-wing side with Pruneau skating hard to the far post. Collins slipped the pass through the Canadians defender and created a scoring chance that almost no goalie would have stopped as Pruneau put his shot in the top half of the net to open the scoring.
Panic appeared to briefly show up in the Canadians game after giving up the goal as Rockland kept the pressure up after the goal in the middle period, but the Canadians kept the deficit to one goal heading to the third.
Josh Norman doubled the Rockland lead early in the third period, getting a power play goal for a 2-0 lead. Throughout the game, the Nationals were able to get a player wide open and behind the Canadians defence while on a Rockland power play and this time it paid off as Norman had time to gather the rebound and chip it past Murphy before the Canadians closed in on him.
Ryland Mosley scored with 2:32 left in the game and gave the Canadians a chance to pull their goalie and go with an extra attacker late. They generated chances but couldn’t get a second goal against Joe Giacobbo as the Canadians dropped the first game in a home-and-home weekend against the Nationals.
“It was not a very good game for us at all,” Clarke said following the loss. “Have to tip your hat off to Rockland, they worked a lot harder than we did and executed some of their game plan a lot better than we did. They deserved to win and we deserved to lose.”
After the losses to the Brockville Braves and Hawkesbury Hawks last weekend, Clarke said he was going to work on picking up the compete level in the team and get them to battle.
He said Friday’s game was “very disappointing” after the week of practice where he tried to address that.
“I think there’s a lot of guys in that room that think they’re a lot better than they are,” Clarke added. “In this league you have to compete, if you don’t compete you can’t win.”
The second part of the home-and-home weekend comes on Sunday when the two teams meet up at the Carleton Place Arena with game time set for 3 p.m.
