MacEwan Athletics
CARONPORT, Sask. – Want the antidote for a hot goalie?
Get greasy. Get in his face. Get in his head.
A day after being stymied by Briercrest's Dan Dekoning, who made 52 saves on Friday night to steal a 2-1 win for the Clippers, the Griffins followed the recipe to a T as they recovered with a 6-3 victory on Saturday afternoon.
"Similar to last night, I thought we played well," said MacEwan interim head coach Michael Ringrose. "We were a little bit better on the details. If you look at the goals we scored, they were second opportunities, pucks laying around the net.
"If there was one thing we picked up from last night's game watching video is we needed a more committed net presence. We got that (today) and we were rewarded for it. That was ultimately the difference in the game."
MacEwan got to Dekoning early when Ryan Baskerville potted a power-play rebound off Brett Njaa's shot just 5:44 into the game. Nolan Yaremchuk made it 2-0 when he crashed the net and Brett Smyth found him with a back-door pass for a tap-in.
But the pesky Clippers, who were badly outshot on Friday and again on Saturday, scored two power-play goals in the first 6:50 of the second period (Daniel Stollery and Tysen Smith) to knot it back up.
MacEwan regained the lead at 11:40 of the second on Baskerville's second of the game, when he walked in from the goal-line, created a scrum in front and jammed it home.
Briercrest refused to go away, though, scoring inside the final minute of the second – a Mark MacKinnon tally, again on the power-play.
"At different times in the year, you're going to face adversity," said Ringrose, whose team refocused in the intermission and came out flying in the third. "For us, we knew that our process was good the night prior. We weren't happy with the result, but we were happy with the process. There were a couple of things we identified and cleaned up. We thought we'd done a better job of that through two periods, so it was just a test. We faced some adversity.
"For us to come together, I was proud of how our group handled that and just got back to playing our game in the third period and doing the things that we need to do to be successful."
Brett Njaa scored the eventual game-winning goal 5:07 into the third, converting off a two-on-one rush with Ryan Benn.
"That was a big goal for us," said Ringrose. "It was 3-3 after two and we knew we'd been the better team, but we needed one to get our wheels going in the third."
Just over a minute later, Matthew Waseylenko added an insurance marker when he beat Dekoning with a point blast through a screen.
Cameron Gotaas made it 6-3 at 13:24 of the third when he slotted home a short-handed rebound off Dallas Smith's shot.
MacEwan outshot Briercrest 49-18 in the game. Marc-Olivier Daigle picks up the win.
With the result, the Griffins will head into the Christmas break with a 9-5-0 record – good for fourth in the ACAC – while Briercrest (3-9-1-1) sits seventh.
More importantly for the Griffins is they won seven of their last eight games to recover from a slow start.
"Real important," said Ringrose. "Ever since our bye week, I've been really happy with our group. We're continuing to build, focus on little details that are making us successful and most importantly we have an identity and we're on the same page.
"The body of work since that break is certainly something we can be proud of and that we can build on heading into the second half."
