Team seeking revenge on weekend road swing

It appears to be their toughest road test so far.
Beginning this evening in Kelowna, the Prince George Spruce Kings play three road games in as many days. By their terms, it’s been a relatively light road schedule to this point so overcoming the bus travel this weekend may be the biggest challenge.
After meeting the Westside Warriors tonight, the Spruce Kings travel into the West Kootenays to meet the Trail Smoke Eaters for a Saturday evening contest. From there, they’ll head back to the Okanagan for a meeting with the Salmon Arm SilverBacks.
Four of the Spruce Kings’ 10 games were played away from the Coliseum. However, their Cariboo rivals have accounted for 75 per cent of their road schedule to this point, as they’ve played twice in Williams Lake and once in Quesnel. Their longest trip was a drive down to Merritt for a meeting with the Centennials on Sept. 18, a game which produced their first victory of the season, a 2-0 triumph.
The trip also gives the Spruce Kings an opportunity to enact revenge on a pair of opponents which left Prince George after victories last month. The Warriors hammered the Spruce Kings 8-3 in their season opener on Sept. 11. Nine days later, the SilverBacks left the Coliseum after downing the Spruce Kings 7-6.
“We’re not that far away from Westside. We’ve got to just keep going, keep working hard at putting everything together and get a consistent performance from all areas, goaltender, defence and forwards,” Spruce Kings head coach and general manager Ed Dempsey said.
A winning record this weekend would help the Spruce Kings either close or shorten the gap between themselves and the top four squads above them in the nine-team Interior Division standings. With a record of four wins, six losses, zero ties and zero overtime losses (4-6-0-0), the Spruce Kings are tied with the Quesnel Millionaires (3-5-0-2) for fifth in the division with eight points. But Westside and Salmon Arm, the teams occupying third and fourth place in the conference, are four points ahead with 12.
“A couple of big wins here out on the road will keep Salmon Arm and Westside right in the mix with all the rest of us,” Dempsey said. “That’s important to everybody, especially us because we want to move up in the standings as much as we possibly can on any given night.”
If the standings are any indication, the Spruce Kings have fared reasonably well against the teams they should defeat. They defeated the last-place Williams Lake TimberWolves (2-8-0-0) in two of three head-to-head meetings thus far. Meanwhile, their victory over Merritt was the only game between those two squads thus far this season.
Saturday marks the first contest of the campaign between the Spruce Kings and eighth-place Smoke Eaters (2-8-1-0).
The Spruce Kings are coming off a 2-1 overtime victory over the Millionaires on Tuesday evening at the Coliseum. With three skaters a side, 20-year-old blue liner Josh Pineiro scored the winner, his second marker of the game, with only 24.2 seconds remaining in the second five-minute overtime session. His soft wrist shot from the point appeared to handcuff Mills goalie Kirby Halcrow, who had played a solid game, stopping 26 of 28 shots in the contest.
Tuesday’s game was a defensive battle the whole way through, as the Mills held a 32-28 edge in the shot count. Pineiro opened the scoring early, recording a power-play goal 5:19 into the game. The Mills pressured in the third and managed to tie the game with only 1:19 left in regulation time, when Eliot Raibl’s wrist shot fooled Spruce Kings goalie Alex Wright.
The Spruce Kings finished 1-for-4 on the power play. The Mills couldn’t score on six opportunities with the extra man.
Dempsey was pleased to see the Spruce Kings shut out the opposition while short handed on Tuesday. As of Wednesday, their penalty kill efficiency of 65.71 per cent at home was ranked 16th in the 17-team league, ahead of only the Nanaimo Clippers (57.69). On their road, their penalty kill efficiency of 89.47 per cent placed them first in the league.
“We had a good night killing penalties last night and our power play got a goal for us. Again, we’ve got a long way to go in both those areas,” Dempsey said.
For fans of both teams, a Spruce Kings-Mills game may not seem complete without at least one fight. There were a couple of them on Tuesday evening, as Jeremy Wiebe and Jonathan Gibson dropped the gloves for the home team. Gibson’s fight was the more memorable of the two, as he dropped Brandon Watson to the ice. Watson, a 17-year-old rookie forward, had to be assisted off the ice by his Quesnel teammates.
Twenty-year-old forward Joe Morgan wasn’t in the lineup for the Spruce Kings on Tuesday. Dempsey said he injured his shoulder during Saturday’s 4-2 loss at Williams Lake. Although it’s not a separated shoulder, Dempsey listed Morgan’s status as doubtful for this weekend. Colten Derickson continues to recover from a concussion suffered against the SilverBacks at the Coliseum on Sept. 20. He won’t be in the lineup this weekend, but will resume practicing with his full gear on Monday, noted Dempsey.
Clayton McEwan was listed as day-to-day with a rib injury on Wednesday.
Dempsey said forward Luke Hannas will be back in the lineup after serving a suspension. He expects defenceman Jeff Datoff, who’s coming off a collarbone injury, will also be ready for action this weekend.
Tuesday marked defenceman Brad Bourke’s first game as a Spruce King. The 20-year-old native of Onoway, Alta., joined the team from Merritt in a trade for 20-year-old forward Andrew Pickering.
“It was a great game, and the fact that we won made it even more fun to be involved in,” Dempsey said. ” It had everything. It was up and down and good goaltending at both ends, good strong positional play by both teams.”