VICTORIA 4 TRAIL 3
Another one-goal game, what else would you expect?
For the 10th time this season the Victoria Grizzlies found themselves in that very situation, coming up with their seventh such victory in a 4-3 triumph over the Trail Smoke Eaters on Friday night before a crowd of 1,445 at Bear Mountain Arena.
The Grizzlies continue to win the tight games and improve to 9-4-0-1, while Trail slips to 5-10.
"It just shows you the league has a lot of parity," said Victoria associate coach and assistant general manager Craig Didmon.
"Trail outworked us tonight, however, we were lucky to have more goals at the end of the night.
"It wasn't a great performance by us, I know that we can be better than we were."
A pair of power-play goals in the second period helped erase a 2-1 deficit for the Grizzlies as Gerry Fitzgerald, with one of his two on the night, and Zach Urban provided some much needed offence on the man advantage. Urban's slapper gave the hosts a 4-3 advantage at 17: 18 of the frame.
Fitzgerald's power-play goal came off a fine feed from Nolan DeJong just 1: 31 into the second just after Grizzlies' goaltender Mike Stiliadis made a super glove save off a shorthanded Trail effort.
"I think the guys have been keying on getting our power play going," said Didmon. "We worked on it this week and it was nice to see we won the special teams battle and we got a good [penalty] kill at the end, too."
Turner Lawson went to the box at 16: 53 of the third on a hooking call, but Stil-iadis kept a clean sheet in the period.
Fitzgerald's second tally had provided Victoria with its first lead of the evening at 11: 33 of the middle period, but Trail came right back to tie it 18 seconds later on a goal by Luke Sandler.
Of the seven one-goal wins, three have come in overtime.
"It's a pretty tight group and they have a lot of pride," Didmon said of his players. "They had a good crowd here tonight, too, and the guys realize that.
"We had a team coming in here whose record wasn't as good as ours and it becomes a must-win. These are two points we needed and we got it done. It wasn't pretty, but it's still two points at the end of the day."
The first period started out a little on the lazy side.
Brent Baltus put Trail up 1-0 catching Grizzlies' newcomer Chris Albertini on a horrendous line change.
But David Mazurek came right back to bang in a rebound to tie it up at 1-1 as the teams traded goals 1: 43 apart by the 15: 59 mark.
Albertini, who started the game with a big hit, took a run at a Trail opponent late in the opening 20 minutes and Braeden Jones came to his teammate's defence, but Alber-tini pounded Jones, sending him to the dressing room for repairs.
Albertini is a solid six-foot-three, 215-pound blue-liner who played 26 games with three goals for the Ontario Hockey League's Plymouth Whalers. He's been around the team for the last week and finally received approval to play.
Late in the first the Smoke Eaters made it 2-1 as Baltus collected his second with 16.8 seconds left in a period where the Grizzlies out-shot their visitors 15-8.
That's when the Grizzlies' power play came to life.
Victoria now travels to Nanaimo tonight at 7 to face the Clippers for the second time this season, having lost 4-2 up Island last month.
IN THE DEN: Grizzlies' fans looking to listen in on road games can download the Ustream application onto their iPhones to tune into play-by-play man Scott Didmon.
