Maybe it was having their parents in the building and wanting to put on a good show for the folks.
Or maybe they just sensed early on they were going to make it a night the Vancouver Giants are going to want to forget.
Whatever it was that fired up the Prince George Cougars to run up the score and steamroll the Giants in 6-3 Saturday at CN Centre, there was no disguising the kind of hockey team the Prince George Cougars have become with the playoffs fast approaching in the Western Hockey League.
The Cougs are leading the charge to be top cats in the Western Conference and showed why the rest of the West is chasing them. Aside from a few letups in the third period that led to two Vancouver goals, they dominated the Giants, building an insurmountable lead, and made it a lot of fun to watch for the partisan crowd of 4,486.
The Cougars besieged Giants starting goalie Brett Mirwald, forcing turnovers and struck gold around the net. Four goals on seven shots chased Mirwald from the game right less than eight minutes in.
Ondrej Becher was marshall of the goal parade and got the Cougars going with back-to-back snipes three minutes apart with the game barely four minutes old. His second was unassisted 4:13 in after he stole the puck away from the Giants.
Ty Halaburda was the shutout spoiler 5:13 in, denying Joshua Ravenbergen his latest attempt for his seventh goose egg, which would be a WHL record for rookies.
That Cougars quashed any hopes that Giants’ goal would shift the momentum. Riley Heidt had an open net to shoot at for his 34th of the season after taking a crisp cross-ice pass from Keaton Dowhnaniuk.
The 20-year-old Zac Funk continued his amazing goal-scoring antics with back-to-back goals, leaving him with a league-leading 63 in just 62 games. Nineteen seconds after Heidt’s goal, Borya Valis stripped the puck away from defenceman Logan Hammett just inside the offensive zone and wisely fed it to Funk who blasted it in behind Mirwald, which brought replacement goalie Matthew Hutchinson into the game.
Funk followed up with his second of the game with blast from right close to the goal-line and team-record 63rd on a Cougar power play early in the second period. Funk also assisted on Becher’s opening goal and his three-point game left him just three points shy of Quinn Hancock’s team-record 112-point season, set in 1997-98.
“I think our first period was one of our best periods of the year, so when you’ve got everybody rolling like that, that‘s pretty awesome and it’s easy to play when we’re all playing together like that,” said Funk. “Hopefully we can continue to do those things and get better.
“We wanted to treat it like a Game 7. Lamber (head coach Mark Lamb) kind of put the gameplan in our hands and we executed it to perfection I think in the first 10 there and got four quick ones and obviously took them out of the game early.”
Funk has 12 goals and seven assists in the past eight games.
Mateo Danis also scored for the Cougars.
Giants rookie Jakob Oreskovic cashed in a Cameron Schmidt feed from the corner or his third of the season and Adam Titlbach also scored on Ravensbergen.
The Giants were outshot 39-16.
The Cats now have points in 13 straight (11-0-1-1) and improved to 43-15-1-3, two wins away from tying the 2016-17 Cougars for most wins in a season.
LOOSE PUCKS: Heidt is now within five of Hancock’s points record with 107. He now has 34 goals and 73 assists… The Cougars head on the road for four games in less than five days. They visit Kelowna on Wednesday, then hit Victoria for games Friday and Saturday, ended with a Sunday afternoon game against the Giants… The Cougars have one home game left, on Saturday March 23, when they close out the regular season against the Kamloops Blazers… The Giants were without their captain, Calgary Flames draft pick Samuel Honzik, who had to fly home to Slovakia to write his Grade 12 exams. Cougars defenceman Viliam Kmec had to leave the Cougars last year around the same time to write his tests, a requirement for high school graduation in Slovakia… Cougars winger Koehn Ziemmer has been skating the past week and it’s looking promising he’ll soon be ready to return to action. He’s listed as day-to-day and Lamb would not rule out him coming back during the roadtrip. Ziemmer hasn’t played since he broke his ankle in a fight in a game Nov. 27 against Everett.
