Sports
Second-place showdown Thursday
Two teams separated by a meager point will
face off in a key Pacific Junior Hockey League mid-season game Thursday at
Minoru Arenas.
Coming off a 6-4 victory over the Panthers
Saturday in Port Moody, and winners of four of their last six, the Richmond
Sockeyes (10-5-1-1) can, with a win, pass the North Vancouver Wolf Pack and
move into second place in the Tom Shaw Conference standings. Game time is 7
p.m.
The Pack (10-4-0-3) lost their most recent
game 5-2 Saturday to the white-hot Delta Ice Hawks (losers of just a single
game in 17) and have a 3-3 record in their last six outings.
Brett Gelz powered the Sockeyes to a 6-5
victory over North Vancouver in the last meeting between the clubs, Oct. 14 on
the North Shore. His overtime winner completed a hat trick as Richmond rallied
from a 4-1 first-period deficit.
Richmond head coach Steve Robinson is among
those looking forward to this week’s engagement.
“They’ll be a motivated, hungry team,”
Robinson says of the Pack. “Aside from the fact it’s between two teams jockeying
for second place in the standings, we’ve given them two of what I call hurting
losses. We won both previous games against them 6-5, after they had sizeable
leads in both. Those ones really sting, so you know we’ll see a good, hard
effort from them. But I welcome it. We need to see how we respond to that kind
of adversity.”
Robinson is also anxious to see how the
Sockeyes fare against the Ice Hawks next Tuesday (Nov. 14) in Delta.
Going 7-2-0-1 in their last 10 games, the
Sockeyes have been trending well, though still not firing on all cylinders as
Robinson would like to see. He sees the game against Delta as not only a chance
to upset the league-leaders, but to see how much progress his club has made in
the last several weeks.
Nicolas Bizzutto’s goal and two assists led
Richmond past Port Moody. Bizzutto is now third in team scoring with 12 goals
and 18 points. Jacob Keremidschief scored back-to-back goals in the second
period, and now has six points in as many games, while defenceman Matt Brown stepped
up with three helpers. Captain Tyler Andrews was held to an assist but still
leads the club with 33 points in 16 games.
Rookie Hardarshan Hoonjan continues to play
well in net for the Sockeyes, picking up his sixth win in 10 starts. He sports
a solid .906 save percentage.
“Hoonjan has given us some stability in net,
and once he played eight games we decided to card him,” Robinson explains. “And
up front, we’ve taken a more balanced, four-line approach. We felt we needed to
get some more secondary scoring if we wanted to have success in the long term.”