The West Kelowna Warriors take on the Portage Terriers on Tuesday afternoon in their third matchup of the 2016 Western Canada Cup.
The Warriors are coming off a loss to the Brooks Bandits on Sunday by a 4-2 score, while the Terriers are 2-0 after a 2-1 win over Melfort and a 3-2 win over the Estevan Bruins. A win for the Terriers would lock up a berth in the 1-2 game on Saturday night for the WCC Championship.
The Terriers are the defending National Champions as they hosted the RBC last year. They did qualify out of the WCC as the West #2 seed, beating Melfort in the RBC Qualifier game. The Mustangs also advanced to RBC since Portage was the host.
Portage is lead by twins Brad and Shawn Bowles, who both had great years in the MJHL averaging 1.7 points per game. Brad is the goal scorer, as he put in 45 in 60 games, while Shawn scored 19 in 39 games. Brad finished with 102 points.
In goal, Nathan Park had great numbers this season going 38-7 with 1.92 GAA and a .922 SV%, as the Terriers finished the season at 52-6-2.
Special Teams wise, the Terriers were 57/232 on the man advantage (24.6%) which is the same % as the Warriors had in the regular season. Portage went 11/55 in the postseason, and is currently 2/11 in the WCC. Portage had the best PK of all WCC teams in the regular season only allowing 27 power-play goals against for an 88.8% clip.
West Kelowna knows that they'll need to get their power play working in order to have success, as they enter Tuesday's game having gone 1/15 on the man advantage. The penalty kill has been good though going 15/16.
Don't expect Tuesday afternoon's tilt to have the amount of power plays as the Brooks game did, but again anything can happen in a tournament like this, as we saw on Sunday afternoon. It was clear that the two teams didn't like each other on Sunday, but West Kelowna probably would have had a lot less power play opportunities if they had capitalized on a couple more chances in the first half of the game.
Tune in to the action starting with the 12:40 BC time pre-game show at www.mixlr.com/bchlwarriors while puck drops at 2 PM.
No comments:
Post a Comment