By: Daniel Vazzoler
The Carleton Place Canadians have dropped back-to-back regular season games for the first time since Oct. 16-21, 2016 following Sunday’s 4-3 loss to the Hawkesbury Hawks.
The Canadians, coming off a 3-2 shoot-out loss against the Brockville Braves on Friday, were looking to use Sunday’s home opener as a bounce-back game and got off to a good start. Jackson Sterrett gathered a loose puck in the slot and beat Matthew Petizian 3:21 into the game for a 1-0 lead.
Then the momentum flipped.
In a span of just over six minutes to end the opening period, Hawkesbury struck for three goals against Connor Murphy – something no team had been able to do yet in the young season. Luke Grainger tied the game with a goal off the rush before Jeremie Lavallee ended the period with two goals exactly 1:00 apart.
“I thought we competed in the first period and had a lot of good opportunities, but missed two simple assignments and got behind the 8-ball really quickly,” Canadians coach Jason Clarke said. “We need to respond a lot better than we did when we missed those two assignments. You need to come out and play a lot harder and we did the exact opposite. We got behind early and then shut down.”
The second period provided Carleton Place with a number of chances to close the gap between it and Hawkesbury with seven power play chances in the frame, but all went for naught as the Canadians couldn’t score – only going 1-for-11 in the game with the lone power play goal scored by Zach Tupker with 0:01 remaining in the game.
“They collapsed to the middle pretty good but we have to recognize that and adjust, which is something that we didn’t do today,” Canadians forward Ben Tupker said of the power play struggles. “We’re going to have a good week of watching video and stuff like that to figure out what we have to do next time when we’re faced with a situation like that.”
It is early in the season, with Sunday being the Canadians’ fifth game, but Clarke isn’t allowing that as an excuse for his team’s struggles when it was on the power play against Hawkesbury.
“We just didn’t execute,” he said. “These guys are Jr. A players and there just wasn’t a lot of compete, wanting to get pucks and wanting to win one-on-one battles and move pucks into tight areas on the power play. Hawkesbury did a good job, you’ve got to tip your hat to Hawkesbury, they came in with a game plan and, even though they fell behind 1-0 early, they followed their game plan through.”
The struggles for Carleton Place continued into the third period as Lavallee capped off his hat-trick performance with his second power play goal, chipping a rebound over a sprawled-out Murphy at the side of the net.
The Tupkers helped make the score more respectable in the final minutes of the game, with Zach scoring a pair of goals and Ben assisting on both.
Carleton Place now looks ahead to a home-and-home series this upcoming weekend against the Rockland Nationals, starting on Friday in Rockland before Sunday’s rematch at the Carleton Place Arena.
Both Tupker and Clarke say this week is an important one in terms of getting better as a team.
“We have a big week ahead of us, it’s still early in the season so it’s a crucial time where we have a lot of stuff to work on,” said Tupker.
“You play the way you practice,” Clarke added. “We’re obviously going to have a lot of things to work on in practice, make sure we have better habits and be more consistent with the way we play the game. And that all comes down to practice.”
