Calgary Wranglers Recap: Defensive scoring leads the effort in comeback win against the Reign
1 year ago
The Calgary Wranglers and Ontario Reign faced off on Sunday afternoon for their last match-up against each other of the regular season. The Wranglers won their previous match-up on Friday and held quite the record against the Reign going into their Sunday matinee. Going into this game the Wranglers were up 6-0-1-0 on the season series. After this game, they added another win to that record with a come from behind effort that ended in a 4-3 Wranglers win.
Game at a glance
The goaltending match-up included Dustin Wolf in net for the Wranglers and Matthew Villalta in net for the Reign. This game got off to a good pace with not a whole lot of action in the opening half of the first other than a penalty a side.
12:30 into the first, Ontario opened up scoring with a power play goal just two seconds into the man advantage. It was a quick spurt of bad luck for the Wranglers as just over a minute later, Ontario took a shot and it deflected off Ilya Solovyov’s blade of his stick and floated into the back of the net. Extremely tough read for Wolf and not much he could do on that second marker.
The first period ended with the Wranglers down 2-0 and narrowly trailing 9-8 in shots. In the second, the Wranglers came out determined to get some goals back and were successful in that effort. Yan Kuznetsov scored the Wranglers’ first goal 3:30 into the second period with Kevin Rooney and Colton Poolman assisting.
That got the Wranglers one back in the second period and no other scoring occurred in that frame. Calgary out-shot Ontario in the second period 13-9. In the third, some other defencemen got in on the scoring action with Nick DeSimone leading the way. DeSimone cut to the crease and scored off a backhand shot 4:28 into the third period. Connor Zary and Emilio Pettersen assisted.
Tied up at two, the Wranglers weren’t quite finished with the scoring efforts. Much later in the period, Ilya Solovyov ripped a shot from the blue line and scored 14:57 into the frame to give the Wranglers their first lead of the night. Jeremie Poirier and Dryden Hunt assisted.
Exactly a minute later, Cole Schwindt tipped in a power play goal that would go on to be the game-winner. Nick DeSimone and Connor Zary assisted to both get their second points of the night.
The Wranglers were up 4-2 with just over four minutes to go in regulation but the Reign managed to sneak one more goal in before the end of the game. At 18:20 the Reign scored their third goal of the night but their comeback ended there.
The Wranglers beat the Reign in their last match-up of the regular season by a score of 4-3 and were out-shot 30-28 in their fifth consecutive win. Nick DeSimone picked up the player of the game accolade and the first star of the night with a goal and an assist and Connor Zary picked up the second star of the night with two assists on the night.
Next up
Calgary won’t have any midweek games this week and will be back in action next weekend in Tucson to face the Roadrunners. Their next game will be on Friday for a St. Patrick’s Day game starting at 8:00 p.m. MT and will continue their series into Saturday at the same time.
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