Thursday, July 16, 2015

Summer Hockey - Regular Season Ends

The Renegades played the last two games of the summer regular season this week.  On Sunday night we played against the Squid Squad at Kenilworth Arena.  These guys are a really skilled, really tough team and have been beating everyone since the start for the season.  Somehow they lost their first four games, but since then are virtually undefeated.  I think they must have been short a bunch of players at the beginning of the season.  About half way through the game, our top scorer Johnny ended up getting slammed into the boards.  He thought he had broken his leg but a trip to emergency and an x-ray confirmed that it is a really bad ankle sprain.  He will be out for 4 to 6 weeks.  Our team rallied after that and scored two goals, putting us up by a 3-1 score.  We hung on at the end and although they got one late goal, we didn't allow any further ones and won the game 3-2.
Then on Tuesday we played our last game of the summer hockey regular season at Londonderry Arena verses the Xtreme.  We were short a couple of players but had 9 forwards, 4 defense and a goalie.  This was a very lop-sided game.  We jumped out to an early lead, and never looked back, eventually coasting to a 16-4 victory.  
The move to a new goaltender has really paid dividends for us.  Paul played in our last 6 games and has a record of 5 wins and 1 loss, a goals against average of 2.67 and a save percentage of .917.  Having a solid goaltender like this gives our team a lot of confidence, and we play a lot better in front of him.  We finished the regular season in fourth place out of ten teams, and now roll into the playoffs.  We have a bye in the first round and our playoffs will begin with a best of three round on July 26th.  It looks like our opponent will be the Squid Squad, but we are waiting for the final tally by the league to confirm the final standings and the playoff matchups.

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