Cats drop a pair of road games
Published Monday November 30th, 2009
Moncton has produced just two wins in last eight tilts
VICTORIAVILLE, Que. - The Victoriaville Tigres have been one of the hottest teams in all of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League over the last month.
The Moncton Wildcats found that out the hard way yesterday.
The Tigres started strong and hung on for a 5-4 win over the Wildcats in front of a crowd of 2,233 at the Colisée Desjardins.
Shawinigan Cataractes beat the Wildcats 4-3 on Saturday.
Victoriaville, which has nine wins in its last 10 games, were up 5-2 and appeared to be cruising to victory late in the third period when Moncton made things interesting.
During the same penalty kill late in the game, Scott Brannon scored on a breakaway to complete a hat trick and then Randy Cameron scored with 1:40 left to play to cut the lead to 5-4.
The Wildcats pulled goaltender Louis Domingue for an extra attacker, but could not tie the game.
"We waited too long to put pressure on them. We owned the second half of the game," said Brannon, the team captain who single-handedly gave his team a chance to win.
"This loss is the result of a poor start. We took some bad penalties against a really good offensive team and they capitalized," Brannon said.
"We acted too late. If we had played that way the whole game, we would have won."
Philippe Maillet, Maxim Lamarche, Brandon Hynes, Tomas Kublik and Phillip Danault tallied for the Tigres.
Kevin Poulin stopped 24 shots for Victoriaville. Domingue, making his first start in three games after backing up newcomer Shane Owen in the past two games, made 22 saves in the loss.
Moncton, which was missing four key forwards, saw its record drop to 14-10-1-2 for fourth place in the Atlantic Division. It has just two wins in its last eight games.
"We have to put the negatives behind us. We play Tuesday and we have to forget about this," said Brannon, who has a team-leading 17 goals.
"We just have to get out of this slump. We have to stay positive and keep working hard."
Victoriaville took a 3-2 lead into the third period and quickly added to it, getting goals from Danault and Kublik early in the frame.
The Tigres continued to roll along until Brannon and Cameron, who had an assist earlier, struck on the same penalty-kill to give the Wildcats a chance.
"We pushed really hard at the end. We were just a couple of inches from tying it in the final seconds," Brannon said.
"It's disappointing to lose this way, but we have to look at the start of the game."
Victoriaville improved its record to 20-8-0-1.
The Tigres were 2-for-8 on the power play while Moncton was 0-8.
Mark Barberio had two assists for the Wildcats.
Wildcats forward Andrew Roski (shoulder) didn't play.
Affiliate Matt Tomah of the Woodstock Slammers of the Maritime Junior A Hockey League took his place in the lineup.
Cataractes 4 Wildcats 3
In Shawinigan Saturday, the Wildcats blew a 3-1 lead and lost 4-3 to the Cataractes.
Shawinigan scored twice in the third period to rally for the comeback win. Dave Labrecque's goal at 11:57 of the third tied the game and Maxime Legault fired the winner, on the power play, with just 22 seconds left to play.
Charles-Olivier Roussel and Nicolas Larocque-Marcoux also tallied and Pierre-Alexandre Vandall had three assists for Shawinigan (15-10-1-2), which has won five straight games. Gabriel Girard stopped 22 shots in the win.
Matt Brown, Cameron and Alex Saulnier answered for Moncton. Brandon Gormley and Barberio each had two assists in the loss.
The Wildcats received another strong game from goaltender Owen, who made 42 saves in his second consecutive start since joining the team last week.
"Shawinigan is a real strong team. To their credit, they kept pushing. We're missing three of our top six forwards (Kirill Kabanov, Pierre-Marc Lessard and Matthew Bissonnette) and I thought as hard as we played, we start to tire in the last half of the game," said Moncton head coach Danny Flynn.
"Having said that, I thought our guys really battled against a very strong Shawinigan team. We made some costly mistakes in the third period and it came back to bite us."
The Wildcats host the Lewiston MAINEiacs tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Moncton Coliseum.
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