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Cougars fall in Portland

Winterhwaks hand Cats fourth-straight road loss
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 Ouch.
It’s been painful to watch what’s been happening to the Prince George Cougars lately and Saturday’s game in Portland did little to disperse the dark clouds that have descended upon the Cats the past month.
The Portland Winterhawks offered no rays of sunshine, beating the Cougars 3-0 to ring up their second win of the weekend over Prince George. Now wallowing in a slump that’s resulted in six losses in their last seven games, the offensively-challenged Cougars left the ice Saturday at Veterans Memorial Coliseum looking for answers.
The Cougars (11-16-1-2) have now lost four straight road games and they’ve dropped to ninth place in the 10-team Western Conference. The Winterhawks (18-10-0-2), winners of six of their last 10,  are heading in the opposite direction and they rank third in the West.
The Hawks picked up where they left off in their 5-2 win over the Cats Friday night, but it took them the better part of a period to find a hole in Taylor Gauthier’s armour. Jake Gricius gained the puck on the left side after the Cougars blocked Jared Freadrich’s point shot and in the scrum in front Gauthier dropped his stick. The Cougar goalie was trying to pick it up off the ice when Gricius double-clutched and let go a short-side shot from a sharp angle that went in over Gauthier’s shoulder. That came 16:38 into the first period.
In the second period Portland continued to dominate the puck and had 76 seconds of 5-on-3 power-play time early in the period but could not score.
All it took was a momentary lapse of discipline to give the high-scoring Hawks what they needed to add to the count. The Cats were at the tail end of a power play when Vladislav Mikhalchuk got his glove up in the face of Hawks centre Cody Glass and it didn’t take long for Ryan Hughes to capitalize with the extra skater. He got down on one knee to one-time Glass’s cross-ice pass and launched a wicked blast for a 2-0 lead at the 14:39 mark.
“We have to be perfect and we took a bad penalty and put the best power play in the league on a power play and they made us pay for it,” said Cougars associate coach Steve O’Rourke.
The Cougars were outshot 20-11 in the middle frame and the 20th Portland shot ended up in the net. Jaydon Dureau chased down a forward pass that skipped off the ice and Gauthier tried to poke it away but the rolling puck landed on Dureau’s stick and he went wide around Joel Lakusta and Gauthier and shot from the corner to make it a 3-0 game with just 35 seconds left in the second period.
“Taylor knows he made a mistake by trying to get involved in that play and we’re down 3-0,” said O’Rourke. “There’s just some detail things we can be better at. The power play had some looks and some chances but 5-on-5 we didn’t generate enough. It’s just those little details every night that kind of cost you games, cost you opportunities. We don’t finish. The guys battle, but it only goes so far, working like that. You have to finish things off. You have to be better.”
The Cougars had eight minutes of power-play time in the third period, trying to avoid their third shutout loss of the season, but could not beat Shane Farkus. The 19-year-old from Penticton made 22 saves for his second shutout of the season and fourth of his three-year WHL career.
Gauthier stopped 36 shots as his season record dropped to 7-12-1-1.
Cougars defenceman Rhett Rhinehart suffered an upper-body injury late in the second period and did not return for the third. Winger Reid Perepeluk took his place on the blueline.
The Cats resume their 11-game road trip tonight in Kent, Wash., where they’ll face the Seattle Thunderbirds. They’ll also visit Victoria on Friday and Vancouver on Sunday before the Christmas break.
The Cougars and Winterhawks will meet again March 8-9 in Prince George, the second-last weekend of the WHL season.