It’s always a tall order trying to defeat the Kamloops Blazers.
For several years now they’ve maintained their status as one of the top teams in the Western Hockey League and they sure looked the part as B.C. Division leaders when they took to the ice Friday night at CN Centre to face the Prince George Cougars.
Feeding of the energy of newly-acquired forwards Luke Toporowski and Drew Englot, the new-look Blazers dressed a full lineup against a Cougar squad decimated by COVID protocols, which left them with just eight forwards, five defenceman and two goalies.
The results were predictable, a 5-1 Blazer win in which they outshot their opponents 53-32.
Toporowski scored two goals and drew an assist in his first game since coming over from the Spokane Chiefs. The 20-year-old left winger from Bettendorf, Iowa fit in well on the Blazers’ top line with centre Logan Stankoven and right winger Caeden Bankier and together they created chaos in the Cougar end.
Toporowski went to his backhand to finish off a three-way pass play with three minutes gone in the first period and Daylan Kuefler made it a 2-0 game late in the period, scoring on a rebound – the 19th of 20 shots in the opening 20 minutes on Tyler Brennan.
Cougars rookie Caden Brown cut the lead in half early in the second period when he crashed the net to bang in a rebound left when Keaton Dowhaniuk’s point shot gave goalie Dylan Garand trouble. But it was all Blazers after that. Stankoven connected on a one-timer from the slot midway through the period, then fed the puck a few minutes later to Toporowski for his 17th goal of the season.
Reece Belton capped the scoring early in the third period, in front of 1,847 witnesses at CN Centre.
“We had some good spurts,” said Cougars head coach and general manager Mark Lamb. “I thought in the D-zone we needed to clean up a few things in a few little passes with some support to get out of our zone and we didn’t do that. It created a lot of chaos for us in the d-zone, with a lot of pressure on us.”
Lamb says he’s never been in a situation with just 13 skaters available to him and being that shorthanded had an obvious effect in determining the outcome.
“There’s no reason why a person would have seen that,” said Lamb. “We’re in a pandemic right now and there’s a lot of weird things that happen. But the good news is we get to go out there and do what we love, and that’s play hockey.
"We're not going to get anybody back for (Saturday). The challenges are we've played a lot of hockey. We just had two games against Victoria and not a lot of rest and we couldn't practice the day in between because we had to just stay away and see if any more guys (become infected with COVID)."
The win lifted the Blazers’ second-place Western Conference record to 23-11-1-0. The Cougars, who saw their four-game winning streak come to an end, dropped to 17-18-1-1, sixth in the conference. The same teams meet again Saturday in Kamloops (7 p.m. 94.3 FM, The Goat).
