On a night when it seemed nobody was willing to take on the role as a scoring hero, the Prince George Spruce Kings found what they were looking for in Trevor Pereverzoff.
The 18-year-old defenceman picked a great time to collect the first goal of his B.C. Hockey League career, a seeing-eye wrist shot from the point that fluttered in through a crowd to lift the Spruce Kings to a 2-1 win over the visiting Surrey Eagles.
Pereverzoff, a native of Kelowna on loan to the Kings from the junior B Princeton Posse, has seven goals and 22 points in 32 games in the Kooteney International Junior Hockey League this season, but had been held to just one point in his previous 10 games as an injury replacement with the Spruce Kings.
"Trevor has been terrific in his time here, this is his 11th game with us this season and he's getting better and better every game," said Kings general manager Mike Hawes. "We've been using him fairly regularly on the back end and he's contributed well and I'm happy for him that he got that first goal."
The goal came 7:43 into the third period and with chances few and far between, many of the 814 fans in attendance at the Coliseum sensed it might stand up as the winner.
The Eagles ended the game on the penalty kill and almost tied it with two seconds left when Surrey centre won the draw in the Kings' zone and Joseph Drapluk unloaded a wicked blast that Alex Brooks-Potts stopped with his leg pads.
As an affiliated player, Pereverzoff is limited to 10 BCHL games, but the Kings will get to use him again tonight against the Eagles due to the fact two of the games he played back in December were to fill in for defenceman Viktor Dombrovskiy while he played for Canada West in the Word Junior A Hockey Challenge.
With the victory, the third-place Spruce Kings (21-19-0-4) crept to within six points of second-place Chilliwack, seven points behind the Mainland Division-leading Langley Rivermen. The Eagles (7-34-0-3) are well out of the playoff race, sitting last overall in the 16-team BCHL.
Both teams looked a discombobulated mess in the first half of the game, which limited the quality scoring chances to only a few at either end. Eagles rookie Cole Plotnikoff opened the scoring 12:34 into the second period, picking up a loose puck in the high crease and sliding it in along the ice before goalie Brooks-Potts could pounce on it.
The Kings answered less than a minute later. Cole Todd followed up on a wraparound and picked the corner with a snap shot that got behind Christian Short, the Eagles' six-foot-four netminder. The Kings seemed to gain a some traction from that goal and started putting more sustained pressure on the Eagles, outshooting them 21-7 in the middle frame.
"It's teams like Surrey that are the most dangerous, they had nothing to lose and they came in and played well tonight," said Hawes. "I think we had enough chances to create some separation in the game that we didn't capitalize on."
The Kings have the league's eighth-ranked power play, firing at a 23 per cent clip, but they had tough time making any headway against the Eagles penalty-killers. The Kings went without anything that remotely resembled a scoring chance in four opportunities until late in the game, when they were shooting at an empty net with Short on the bench for the extra skater.
The same teams clash again tonight in the rematch at the Coliseum (7 p.m. start), which will mark the end of the Kings' five-game homestand. They'll travel next weekend to Langley, Chilliwack and Surrey.
