Thanks to one of the wildest plays in the OHL season – certainly so far in the playoffs – the Barrie Colts are heading home with a chance to wrap up their first-round playoff series against the Niagara IceDogs.
In an unbelievable sequence that saw two huge saves by Barrie at one end - including one by a defenceman - and the game-winning goal at the other, the Colts have the IceDogs on the brink of playoff elimination after a 6-3 victory, Thursday night, at the Meridian Centre in St. Catharines.
With the score all even at 3-3 and just 30 seconds gone in the third period, Barrie netminder Sam Hillebrandt came way out of his net to stone Niagara forward Kevin He from the low faceoff circle. The rebound went to Ethan Czata who fired the puck at a wide-open cage only to have Tristan Bertucci, swat the sure goal out of the air and out of his end.
Dalyn Wakely would pick up the loose puck on a breakaway, but the overager botched the deke. He then threw it in front to Owen Van Steensel, who deked around Niagara goalie Owen Flores only to be tripped.
Van Steensel would send the puck across the crease where Anthony Romani was there to tap it home.
Beau Jelsma and Wakely, into an empty net, would seal the dramatic win and give the Colts a commanding 3-1 lead in the Eastern Conference best-of-seven series.
“No,” said Colts’ general manager and head coach Marty Williamson when asked if he’d ever seen a play as wild as this one. “It’s probably the strangest and greatest play I’ve ever seen in my career.
“The save first by Hillebrandt and then (Bertucci) batting it out of the air, and then us going down to score, it was really quite an event.”
Barrie can now wrap things up Saturday night back at Sadlon Arena.
“We don’t want to come back here,” said Williamson. “It’s a tough building. There’s a lot of atmosphere and there’s a lot going on. It’s tough to win on the road in the playoffs. We have a lot of respect for their team.
“We’re going back in front of our fans and I’m confident that we’ll play one of our best games.”
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The Colts would cap off a back-and-forth battle with four unanswered goals beginning with Bertucci’s power-play marker to tie the game with just 20 seconds remaining in the second period.
“It was great. It was a whole team effort,” Jelsma said of his team’s dramatic finish. “A big save by Hillebrandt, and even (Bertucci) made a save for us. It was a whole team effort and I’m happy that we came out in the third the way we did.”
With a similar 4-3 lead early in the third and a chance to grab a commanding 3-0 series lead in Game 3 on Tuesday night, the Colts let it slip away in a 6-4 loss.
Not this time.
“What happened to us last time here on Tuesday, we just said we don’t want that to happen again, and we did everything we could, so it didn’t,” said Jelsma, who along with Bertucci, Romani, and Van Steensel each had a goal and assist in the win.
Wakely, with a goal and three assists, and Carter Lowe also scored for the Colts who have been strong at locking down third-period leads all season.
“We just got a lot of older guys on our team that have been through a lot,” said Jelsma. “We rely on those guys heavily. Like I said, it was just a whole team effort in the third and I’m super happy for the boys.”
Andrei Loshko had the lone goal for the IceDogs, who took a 1-0 lead into the first intermission.
Lowe evened things up early in the second before Mathieu Paris put Niagara back on top midway through the frame. Just 1:35 later, Van Steensel, with Barrie on the power play, tied it at 3-3.
Despite outshooting the IceDogs 21-11 in the second, the Colts would find themselves trailing again on a shot by Alex Assadourian before Bertucci tied it late in the same frame to set up the thrilling third-period finish.
“I thought we started tentative,” said Williamson. “I kind of gave it to the guys between the first and second that you can’t think about a result, you can’t think about losing. You just got to go out there and just play.
“We were overthinking things, and we weren’t fast. In the second and third period, I really liked our team.”
Barrie also appeared to have another goal in the second when Wakely, parked in front, appeared to beat Flores. The goal, though, was disallowed.
Williamson thought his player was pushed into the goalie and the goal should have counted.
I was flabbergasted with the ref,” he said. “I said Czata pushed him. He said, ‘No, there was no contact. Your guy skated right into the crease.’ Otherwise, it would have been a good goal. It was not even off the skate. He got the stick there, so it would have been a good goal. I don’t know how they don’t see Czata give him a push.
“Even if he had said that he didn’t think the push was bad enough or whatever, I would have said, ‘OK, I got to live with it.’ Then he said to me that there was no push, there was nothing. I just found that really strange.”
The Colts, who have outshot the IceDogs in every game of the series, fired 46 shots at Flores compared to the 31 Hillebrandt faced on this night.
Once again, Flores kept his team in the game with several outstanding saves, including an incredible glove stop on Van Steensel when he appeared down and out.
“He’s an unbelievable goalie and he made some really nice saves on us,” said Jelsma. “At the end of the day, good teams find a way to get it done and that’s what we did tonight.”
Williamson said the team talked about the Niagara goaltender’s ability to come up big.
“The kid can get hot, he has periods,” said the coach. “The key is the consistency, just to keep putting pucks on the net. Keep driving it, keep getting rebounds, keep getting chances, and eventually things will go in.
“That’s kind of what happened tonight.”
Williamson believes it’s important his team focus on their own game if they want to end the series in five games come Saturday.
“It’s always the toughest game to tell a team they’re done,” he said. “It’s always tough, so we know they will come, and they will push. We just need to concentrate on our game and the things that we have to do and not worry about any of the outliers and just get the job done.”
Jelsma knows he and his teammates will have to be even better to close out the series.
“We had a great game tonight, but we had some moments where we were not great,” said the overager. “We have the fans behind us back at home, so we just got to just play our game and get her done.”
Game time on Saturday night is 7:30 p.m.
ICE CHIPS: Brad Gardiner (undisclosed) missed his second game, while Bodie Stewart (undisclosed) also was scratched with an injury. Williamson said both are day-to-day. “We’ll see what they’re like (Friday),” he said. “They’re going to both go on the ice, but we’ll see if they can play or not. I thought the two young kids, Jonah McCormick and Sam Black, did a good job. They gave me some shifts.” . . . Ivan Galiyanov (undisclosed), who had two goals in three games, did not dress for Niagara. . . The IceDogs were 1-for-4 on the power play and are now 6-for-16 in the series. The Colts were 2-for-3 with the man advantage in Game 4 and 5-for-13 in the series. . . Wakely’s four points give him 10 in five games (1G, 9A), which ties him for third with Windsor’s Liam Greentree in playoff scoring. . . The Wakely, Romani, and Van Steensel line have wracked up 11 goals and 25 points between them in four games.
