Salmon Arm, B.C. — The Salmon Arm Silverbacks fell 8-2 to the Penticton Vees on Saturday night in the second game of the Okanagan Cup.
GAME SUMMARY
The Silverbacks surrendered two quick goals to start, first from Luc Wilson on a power play and then from Quinn Hutson less than two minutes later. Ten minutes after that, former West Kelowna Warrior Ryan Upson slid in a rebound past Backs netminder Riley Kohonick to give the Vees a 3-0 advantage.
A strange goal got Salmon Arm back into the game less than 30 seconds later, courtesy of Danny Ciccarello’s first tally in the BCHL. Vees defenceman Ben Wozney came out from behind his own net and Ciccarello pressured him enough to knock the puck off his stick right into the crease area, where it was able to somehow sneak through the wickets of goaltender Kaeden Lane and make the score 3-1.
Devlin O’Brien restored the home side’s three-goal lead just 1:01 later, after he hopped on a loose puck, which led to a goaltending change for Salmon Arm, with 17-year-old Liam Vanderkooi replacing Kohonick.
Once more, the Silverbacks responded, this time off a beauty one-timer from Simon Tassy, who finished over the shoulder of Lane after getting a perfect pass from rookie Noah Serdachny.
Salmon Arm kept their momentum going to start the second, as they were able to draw three straight penalties. Any momentum gained by their play at 5-on-5, however, was drained by the lack of a killer instinct on the man advantage. Penticton killed off all three penalties and then got goals from Jackson Niedermayer and Wilson to push their lead to 6-2 after 40 minutes.
In the third, goals from Jack Bar and Hutson made the final score 8-2.
For the full boxscore, click here.
THEY SAID IT
“We recruited a young, mobile defence group: a group that has a lot of offensive upside and we knew there was going to be a little bit of an adjustment period to the defensive game…Looking at the video from last night’s game and even watching today, they’re correctable issues. They’re mistakes where a lot of them are built on some old habits and I don’t think there’s anybody in our room that’s worried right now. It’s just there’s some tweaks that have to be made and we’ve got to put some emphasis on some things, but a lot of these issues and mistakes can be fixed with structure and areas of our game that we really haven’t spent a whole lot of time working on yet. We wanted to use this weekend as a baseline to see where we’re at with everything and be able to formulate a bit of a system and a game plan out of what we’re already working with. So as much as the results were disappointing, there’s definitely a lot of things that were going to be able to use to build off of.” — Asst. Coach Carter Cochrane
WHAT’S NEXT
The Silverbacks will have next weekend off. They take on the West Kelowna Warriors in a home-and-home on October 9 and 10.
Fans can stream all games on HockeyTV.
