VANCOUVER 4
VICTORIA 1
With only two regular-season games remaining, everything now for the Victoria Royals is seen through the prism of the upcoming Western Hockey League playoffs.
In that context, they viewed Sunday’s 4-1 matinee loss to the Vancouver Giants as a simulated swing game after beating the Giants 2-0 and 3-0 the previous two nights of their unusual three-game set.
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“If this was a playoff series, this game would have been the turning point — the difference between being up 3-0 or just ahead 2-1,” noted Victoria defenceman Joe Hicketts.
That made Sunday’s effort all the more disappointing.
“We didn’t have any compete . . . and were content just to stand by and check with our sticks only,” said Hicketts, who is still playing with a sensitive mouth, after losing three front teeth to a puck last week during practice.
The Giants, meanwhile, finally got the hang of this scoring thing.
After being blanked by the Royals in consecutive games Friday and Saturday, the Giants awoke Sunday before an announced 4,801 fans at Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre.
The Royals (38-28-4) had their consecutive victory streak snapped at four games while the Giants (27-40-3) halted a costly nine-game losing streak that has their playoff hopes hanging by a thread.
“It was not our best effort playing against a desperate [Giants] team that has to win-out [in order to have any chance of making the playoffs],” said Royals head coach Dave Lowry.
“We didn’t execute against a team that is fighting for its life and which came out with emotion. We didn’t match that emotion.”
Victoria went with Justin Paulic in the nets after Coleman Vollrath had turned in the back-to-back shutout performances on Friday and Saturday nights that gave him a franchise record six on the season.
It looked like a familiar pattern would continue Sunday when Brandon Fushimi opened scoring for Victoria at 2:44 of the first period with his 14th goal of the season. But the Giants finally ended the six-period scoring drought when Thomas Foster pinged in a goal off the crossbar behind Paulic at 11:59 of the first. The Giants seemed relieved to have the log-jam removed, playing loose and with confidence, and adding goals by Jakob Stukel and defencemen Mason Geertsen and Dmitry Osipov to build a 4-1 lead by the end of the second period.
“If this was the playoffs, we could have been up 3-0 and close to sealing the deal. Instead it would be 2-1. We have to learn lessons from this and apply them as we move forward,” said Fushimi.
Paulic finished with 25 saves while Cody Porter made 30 for Vancouver.
The 10-game season series between Victoria and Vancouver ended 5-5.
The Royals have clinched a playoff berth and are guaranteed to finish second in the B.C. Division and have home-ice advantage against the third-place team in the division — to be Prince George or Kamloops — in a first-round series beginning March 27-28 at the Memorial Centre.
The Royals will close out the regular season with a home-and-away set Friday and Saturday against the Everett Silvertips.
Those will be Vollrath’s next chances to stretch his shutout run. Going back to a game in Kelowna, Vollrath is working on a 129 minute, 31 second shutout streak. He is tracking Patrik Polivka’s Royals record of 139:04 from last season and the franchise record 153:56 set by Matt Esposito in 2006-07 when the club was located in Chilliwack and known as the Bruins.
To break the Royals record, Vollrath will need to hold the Silvertips at bay for eight minutes and 34 seconds into his next game. To obtain the franchise record, he will have to hold the Silvertips off the sheet until 4:26 of the second period.
ICE CHIPS: Former Royals scoring-champion and MVP Jamie Crooks won his second consecutive CIS championship Sunday as his University of Alberta Golden Bears defeated UNB, who started former Victoria Salmon Kings pro goalie David Shantz, 6-3 in the final at Halifax.
