The post-game meeting went on for half an hour in the Prince George Cougars dressing room and it wasn't pleasant for anyone involved.
After yet another disappointing loss on home ice, the Cougars coaching staff and general manager Todd Harkins were looking for some answers as to why the Cougars got their butts handed to them in Wednesday's 5-2 loss to the Prince Albert Raiders.
A wake-up call is needed for a Cougar team that's lost seven of its last 10 games. Harkins usually doesn't get involved in post-game meetings but felt it was time to address the team Wednesday night.
"I just wanted to make sure they understand what I feel and how I feel and what the organization feels and it was a good meeting," said Harkins. "It's all about us being a family as a team. We're all in this together and that's basically what we talked about."
The Cougars have played just two games over the last two weeks and the inactivity obviously hasn't helped. They'll play tonight in Kelowna and on Saturday in Kamloops, leading up to Tuesday's Teddy Bear Toss Night encounter at home against Saskatoon.
"It's a difficult thing to have midweek games and then a week off, it hasn't been great for our kids and we're trying to give ourselves a little push before the Christmas break," said Harkins. "We want to keep ourselves around .500 or above and that's what we'll try to do before the break."
The Cougars handed Wednesday's game to the Raiders with a listless display plagued by missed assignments, giveaways and undisciplined penalties and the visitors responded with two second-period goals to take the lead.
"We shot ourselves in the foot in that one," said Cougars defenceman Marc McNulty, who returned to the lineup after missing nine games with an upper-body injury. "It's tough to gain momentum when you're killing off penalties and guys have to play more minutes than they should."
The Cats are the league's most penalized team and have the worst penalty-killing statistics, working with only 69.8 per cent efficiency. They took seven minor penalties Wednesday and if not for a solid outing from goalie Ty Edmonds, who allowed just one power-play goal, the outcome would have been much worse.
"Ty had a good game but I thought a lot of our guys, myself included, took part of the night off at some point, turning the puck over or not coming back hard enough and with the penalties it's got to stop," said Cougars centre Brad Morrison, who scored his ninth of the season Wednesday. "The second period was a terrible breakdown for us. The second period has always been our worst period.
"We talk about how we can't take penalties and it just keeps happening. It's just being smarter with our sticks and making smarter decisions out there, especially in our end."
Heading into tonight's game the fourth-place Cougars have slipped to 13-15-0-0. They're three points behind the third-place Kamloops Blazers (12-13-3-0) and are six off the pace of second-place Victoria (15-14-2-0). Kelowna (23-3-3-0) sits first overall in the WHL. The Rockets have handily won all four games against the Cougars this season (all in Prince George), outscoring the Cats by a combined 27-9.
"We've only got seven games before Christmas and we want to get back to .500 and go home and have our rest and have a big second half, obviously," said McNulty. "It's always a tough task against Kelowna. They have a pretty good team and it's tough to win in that building. We haven't had a lot of success in there the last few years and we just have to go in with the mentality we can take those guys. We've seen here when we take penalties against Kelowna it's usually in the back of our net so we have to stay out of the box and play hard but play smart."
Tonight's game against the Rockets will be broadcast on Shaw (Cable 10) starting at 7 p.m.
