(Laval) It is possible to win hockey matches by only playing well for two periods. The Laval Rocket proved it Wednesday evening at Place Bell.
A goal from Mitchell Stephens with just over seven minutes remaining in the third period was the highlight of a six-goal outburst and allowed the Rocket to topple the Belleville Senators 6-4.
After receiving the puck from defenseman Tobie Bisson, Stephens outpaced a rival along the ramp on the left flank, rounded the net at full steam before sliding the puck into the goal before defenseman Dillon Heatherington intervened .
His goal gave the Rocket its first lead in the match after the Laval team had conceded the first four goals.
“I thought we showed a lot of character, not to have given up and come back from four goals down,” declared head coach Jean-François Houle after this third consecutive victory for his team.
“I didn’t like the way we started. I found that we rolled up our sleeves and when we decided to play, we had the puck on our palette quite a bit more in the second and third period,” he added.
If Stephens played the heroes, Brandon Gignac was the star of the Rocket with a performance of one goal and two assists.
Olivier Galipeau, William Trudeau and Sean Farrell also scored for the Laval team, which directed 40 shots towards goalkeeper Leevi Merilainen, including 32 from the second period. Stephens and Farrell added an assist each.
Bisson added an insurance net with just over four minutes left in regulation.
Bokondji Imama, Graham McPhee, Angus Crookshank and Zack Ostapchuk scored for the Senators in the first period with 14 shots against Jakub Dobes.
He gave way to Strauss Mann at the start of the middle period. In relief, Mann made 16 saves.
The Rocket’s busy week will continue Friday evening at home with the only visit this season from the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, the Philadelphia Flyers’ farm club.
Soft play
Soft, nonchalant, without much conviction, call it what you want; This is what the Rocket skaters’ play looked like more often than not in the first period. The result was a three-goal deficit after the first 20 minutes.
In the space of 44 seconds, Matthew Boucher won two battles deep in the Laval zone, and each time his efforts led to goals, those of Imama, at 4:22, and McPhee.
Less than 10 minutes later, with the Rocket enjoying a numerical advantage, Crookshank beat Logan Mailloux and beat Dobes on a breakaway to make it 3-0.
Ostapchuk added a power play goal for the visitors before Gignac did the same for the Rocket by hitting his own return on the fly, with 1:14 remaining in the first period.
This goal from Gignac would be the prelude to a much more vigorous second period from the Rocket players.
“Let’s say the ‘coach’ wasn’t happy after the first period, that’s for sure. Sometimes you have to do things to change the momentum. Changing the goalie may have whipped the players up a bit because it wasn’t Dobes’ fault. It’s just that we didn’t introduce ourselves first,” Houle admitted, bluntly, after the meeting.
“We lost a lot of battles along the boards, we weren’t the first on the puck. There were a lot of things we did wrong in the first, but we recovered in the next two periods,” added Houle.
In the second period, his players limited the Senators to seven shots, amassed double that and cut the visitors’ lead to a single goal by scoring twice in 21 seconds midway through the period.
Gignac first served a nice pass to Galipeau who beat Merilainen with a one-timer after a two-on-one push.
Trudeau followed up with a wrist shot from the blue line that seemed harmless, but that the Senators goalie probably didn’t see, because of the heavy traffic in front of his net.
The Rocket managed to bring the duel back to square one from the 31ste second of play of the third period when Farrell capitalized towards the end of a power play that had started in the final moments of the second period.
On the sequence, Gignac collected his third point of the evening.
Less than a minute later, Mann kept the score at 4-4 with what was then his most important save of the game.
He stood like a wall in front of Josh Currie, who had appeared alone in front of him after stealing the puck from Trudeau near the Rocket blue line.
“It is certain that there are important moments in a match where a key stoppage can change the course of a match. It’s not necessarily something I focus on. I just try to pay full attention to each shot. But looking back, it’s nice to know that it was a key save in a victory,” Mann said.
The score would stay that way until Stephens lifted the Rocket fans with a beautiful goal.