Seeing what his teammates were doing to try to protect his first career WHL shutout Saturday against the Seattle Thunderbirds, Taylor Gauthier decided it was time to sacrifice his own body for the cause.
He raced out of his crease to chase down a loose puck along the side boards at CN Centre and dove with his shoulder to nail Nolan Volcan just after the Seattle forward touched the puck. Gauthier’s helmet and mask went flying in the collision and the play was blown dead, but their goalie’s late hit meant the Cougars had to kill off an interference penalty with less than three minutes to play.
On a night when their special teams were indeed special, the Cougars leaned heavily on Gauthier, their best penalty-killer. He stared down Seattle’s 6-on-4 advantage with goalie Liam Hughes swapped for an extra skater and won that battle, but it took a collaborative effort to keep the door barred.
With about a minute left, defenceman Cole Moberg saved the shutout when he dove to clear a loose puck in the crease just before Volcan could swat it into the open net and the Cougars hung on to win 2-0 – sweeping Seattle in the two-game weekend series.
“I felt really good coming into the game and the boys played really well in front of me,” said the 17-year-old Gauthier, who made 37 saves. “I thought I made a couple of good saves and at the end of the game the boys blocked a lot of shots for me and got in front of pucks I couldn’t really see. The shutout is just as big for them as it is for me.”
The hit on Volcan was an unexpected thrill that brought a rise out of the 3,585 spectators, who were treated to a scrappy and entertaining conclusion to the weekend doubleheader.
“I thought I had a better chance of getting to it than I actually did and once I realized I wasn’t going to get to the puck I thought I might as well get to the man,” smiled Gauthier. “(Volcan) got a lot of me and I didn’t get much of him.”
Moberg and Jackson Leppard were the goalscorers.
The win improved the Cougars’ record to 7-7-1-2, third-best in the B.C. Division, and they moved one point ahead of Seattle (7-6-2-0) in the Western Conference standings.
On Friday, Gauthier and the rest of the Cougars shared goalie Isaiah DiLaura’s pain when he allowed the only Seattle goal in a 4-1 victory with just 38 seconds left in the game. Gauthier knows that feeling of losing a shutout late all too well. It happened to him in the season-opener in Victoria when the Royals scored with 1:07 left and went on to beat the Cats in a shootout.
His best save Saturday came with about five minutes left when he was forced to do the splits to make a toe save on Jaxan Kaluski, and he followed that a few seconds later with another toe-flicker to deny Samuel Huo’s low shot through a screen.
The Cougars took four minor penalties in the first period and got out of it unscathed. The T-birds went 0-for-5 on the power play.
The Cats, justifiably, have taken heat over their own power play, which was the worst in the WHL coming into the weekend. But in the past three games they’ve scored five with the man advantage and are now firing at a 14.9 per cent clip. They went 1-for-5 Saturday.
“It was a good effort from everybody, from our two goalies to all our defence and forwards and our special teams,” said Cougars head coach Richard Matvichuk. “We put 120 minutes of hockey together and that was our objective all week.
“Taylor was fantastic. If you ask him his last couple games didn’t go the way he wanted them to go. He went in tonight and he was a game-changer and that’s what we expect from him. Not only did he make the easy saves but he made the big saves and as a competitor you can see how hard he wanted to win that game with the bodycheck at the end.”
Leppard scored his fourth goal of the season with T-birds defenceman Owen Williams off for hooking. That came 5:57 into the second period, set up by a Ryan Schoettler pass into the slot which Leppard finished with a backhand deke on goalie Liam Hughes,
Moberg has had a hot hand lately and he opened the scoring with a high wrister from the face-off circle that sailed in over the shoulder of Hughes, 6:19 into the game. Moberg also assisted on Leppard’s goal and has three goals and eight points in his last five games.
This one had a nastier edge than Friday’s game. Tempers flared a few times and there were a couple of minor scraps but with the score close, neither team went looking for trouble. Cougars defenceman Rhett Rhinehart was already a target for the T-birds as a result of Friday’s shoulder check that knocked 20-year-old Seattle forward Noah Philp out of Saturday’s lineup with an upper-body injury and Rhinehart drew the wrath of the opposition again when he took out Jared Davidson with another clean hit. Davidson had just returned to the ice after serving a bench penalty late in the second period when he took an alley-oop pass and tried to break into the Cougars’ zone 1-on-2. Rhinehart lined him up and decked him cleanly with a shoulder-to-chest hit, prompting Williams to instigate a fight, which he lost decisively.
“Hitting’s a part of hockey and those clean ones always get the boys going,” said Rhinehart, whose parents, Jessica and Dwayne from Lloydminster, Alta., were in the stands watching both weekend games.
“The last few games here we’ve been in lots of them but just haven’t finished them off. Those two against Seattle we’ve been able to play a full 60 both times and we came out with the result we wanted, so there’s nothing but happiness out of that.”
Saturday’s third period was Seattle’s best of the weekend. They outshot the Cats 17-5 in the period but there were no rewards around the net. The T-birds have now lost three straight.
“Right now we’re struggling to score goals and our power play’s not clicking,” said T-birds head coach Matt O’Dette.
“We’ve had some injuries and we’re plugging guys in we aren’t used to being on those units. We’re happy we created some chances tonight but obviously we didn’t finish them. We’re disappointed. Compared to (Friday) it was night and day, effort-wise.”
The Cougars head to Langley for their next games Saturday and Sunday against the division-leading Vancouver Giants.
