Regular Season Game #6

This past weekend, the Castors from Asnieres travelled to the less then spectacular arena in Champigny to face the Elans (Elks). The rink was a little on the small side, with not a stitch of plexiglass to be found. The end boards had netting and the puck was considered to be live if it touched the netting and stayed in play. Needless to say, the elements set the stage for a very interesting game.

Our team has been progressing quite well of late as we are starting to play like a team and developing our style which is based on lots of flow and quick tape-to-tape passes. It's all about puck possesion. In a small rink like in Champigny, against a small, quick, and agressive team, that strategy needs to be modified somewhat as we quickly found out. The first period was a mix of broken plays as we tried to control the play in a rink where there really was not enough space to do it. We still managed to score a couple of goals by going hard to the net and finishing plays.

In the second period, we continued to play the systematic road game. Nothing fancy, just shoot the puck and go to the net. We had a couple of big penalty kills in the second and the momentum from those seemed to keep us going. All the shots eventually paid off as we notched two more goals before the end of the frame. Twenty minutes to go and it was Asnieres 4, Champigny 0.

With a 4-0 lead going into the third, we made the mistake of taking our foot off of the accelerator and tried to cruise out game. Wrong move. Champigny may not be the most talented team, but they do have pride and they were not going away without a fight. They scored their first goal midway through the period and then grabbed another with five minutes to go. They made it interesting by scoring one more with a minute left in the game. In the end however, we shut it down and walked away with a win and a few lessons on closing a team out.

The team is really starting to play well together and the results of our hard work are showing as we currently sit in third place in our division out of ten teams with a third of the season completed. Hopefully we can keep on rolling.