Humbling. Embarrassing. Demoralizing.
All adjectives apply to the Prince George Spruce Kings to describe how they felt after getting pasted twice by the Wenatchee Wild in their home-opening weekend.
They're still licking their wounds after getting outscored 5-1 and 8-0 by the expansion Wild, playing their first games in the B.C. Hockey League. However, the Spruce Kings and their fans can take some comfort in the fact they played a team already considered a legitimate contender for the BCHL crown this season.
The Wild dominated the Kings in just about every aspect and lessons learned last weekend at the Coliseum will hopefully, from a Kings' perspective, bring better results when they hit the road for games Saturday night in Langley and Sunday afternoon in Surrey.
Loosey-goosey defensive zone coverage and far too many turnovers were the major contributors to the downfall of the Kings, and their special teams play was also ineffective. On Saturday, the speedy Wild exploited the Kings for four power-play goals while killing off all five shorthanded situations.
"We weren't very good, we made a lot of mistakes and gave up too many goals off the rush and a lot of goals against we could have eliminated," said Kings head coach Chad van Diemen. "You can't just puck-watch and allow them to find open guys, we have to take those guys off the rush.
"(Losing to the Wild) shows us where we need to get to. That's a good team and we've seen the bar set pretty high if we want to win our division, which is one of our goals, and to do that we have to go through Wenatchee. It shows us how far we have to go in terms of game play and our habits."
Van Diemen and assistants Adam Maglio and Jason Garneau have been addressing those deficiencies in practice this week and the coaching staff expects to see improvements made on the road this weekend, especially from the Kings' returning players.
"We need our vets to step up and start playing like veteran hockey players. Both in practice and in games, we need more out of them, especially early in the season - the vets should be carrying the load and we need better execution from them in games," said van Diemen, who signed with the Kings in the summer, taking over from Dave Dupas.
"It takes time to create good habits where it just becomes routine and that's what we have to do, just repeating a lot of the same stuff over and over until it become natural come game time. Right now, it's new for a lot of the guys."
The Rivermen have nine holdovers from the team that lost to Prince George in the first round of playoffs last season in a tough six-game series.
"Langley is always a physical, hardworking team and they always have good players and recruit well and we're gong to have to be prepared to execute our gameplan," said van Diemen. "I expect them to be a very skilled, fast team and they will be a good test for us. It's their home-opener so there will be a lot of extra emotion for them and they'll be fired up playing the team that knocked them out the year before."
The Eagles are 0-2 to start the season and have just five returnees. Surrey acquired 20-year-old goalie Justin Laforest, who backstopped the Portage la Prairie Terriers to the 2015 RBC Royal Bank Cup
The Eagles have also added some Prince George content. Seventeen-year-old winger Darren Hards has moved up to the BCHL from the Cariboo Cougars major midget team. The P.G. minor hockey product scored his first BCHL goal in his first game, a 6-3 loss Friday to the Rivermen.
"They're going to be hungry, they play hard at home and they're physical and their penalty kill is very good," van Diemen said of the Eagles. "They have some pretty good offensive players and a goalie who won a Royal Bank Cup who has the ability to win games on his own."
In Langley, the Kings will be without their captain, winger Jake LeBrun, who will serve the second game of a two-game suspension for an illegal hit from behind in Friday's game. Ryan Fritz, a 19-year-old returning defenceman, is still recovering from off-season ACL surgery. He plans to suit up for light contact next week in practice at the Coliseum but won't be ready to play until mid-to-late-October.
