Recap: Calgary Wranglers hot start earns them 4-1 win over the Abbotsford Canucks
1 year ago
The Wranglers kicked off their midweek series against the Abbotsford Canucks on Tuesday night for a Valentine’s Day game at the dome. The league-leading Wranglers are a tough team to overcome and the Canucks were not successful in that undertaking. The Wranglers won their first game of the week with a final score of 4-1.
Game at a glance
Calgary kicked off this game with a big first period on the scoring front. They seemed to have Abbotsford goaltender Spencer Martin pretty well figured out exposing his slower lateral movements and scoring practically every goal off a one-timer.
Radim Zohorna started things off with a goal exactly a minute into the game. Ben Jones drew Martin out of the crease and passed the puck up to Zohorna to bury it. Matthew Phillips also assisted on this opening goal.
The Canucks did end up answering back in a timely fashion to keep up with the early Wranglers goal. They beat Dustin Wolf 5:41 into the first period with a power play goal and the score evened up to 1-1.
A couple of minutes later, Mitch McLain scored 7:47 into the period and regained the Wranglers lead. Jeremie Poirier and Clark Bishop assisted. Same as the first goal, McLain was right in the slot to put the shot away.
That wasn’t even the end of it in the first period. Late in the period, Adam Klapka scored on the power play off a feed from Walker Duehr and Nick DeSimone. Watching both McLain’s and Klapka’s goals the only difference appears to be the names and numbers on the back of their jerseys. Same play and a goal to extend the Wranglers’ lead to 3-1.
It was about as good of a first period as you could ask for out of Calgary with a 3-1 lead and a 16-11 lead in shots. The second period was quite a bit less eventful with no scoring and a few penalties for each side. The Wranglers narrowly out-shot Abbotsford 10-9 through the second period.
In the third, it was pretty much the same story. Not a whole lot changed until the Canucks were getting down to the wire and needed to pull their goalie to try and get some goals back. No scoring occurred until the final minute of play when Walker Duehr hit the empty net.
Dustin Wolf picked up his 28th win of the season with 29 saves on the night. He still leads the league in wins and holds a seven-game lead on the next closest goaltender. With it being a back-to-back series, Daniil Chechelev may get the start in Wednesday’s game to give Wolf a well-deserved night off and look for his second win at the AHL level.
Highlights
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Next up
There will be a quick turnaround for this series with the rematch taking place on Wednesday night. Note that puck drop will be an hour earlier than usual at 6:00 p.m. MT. Wednesday’s game will complete this Canucks series before they go on to host the Colorado Eagles this weekend.
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