If there was one negative aspect from the St. Michael’s Buzzers 4-3 victory over the Newmarket Hurricanes on Friday night, it was that the offense came from just one source – the Jesse Beamish, Dan Ciampini and Lucas Lessio line. Against the Seguin Bruins on Saturday night though, the Buzzers received contributions from a variety of sources to total eight goals from seven different shooters in a commanding 8-0 victory.
Buzzers’ Head Coach Mike DePellegrin was pleased to see a decisive victory instead of his team playing down to the level of their opponents which as happened at time this season as the Bruins sit well out of the playoff race in last place in the West Division.
“The Bruins are a team that we need to beat, we need to take the two points from them every time out and that’s our goal,” said DePellegrin. “Early on in the year, we were intimidated by them because they’re an older team and they’re certainly physical but tonight, we carried the momentum through from last night and it was a well rounded effort from all our players.”
St. Michael’s got in front at the 10:01 mark of the first period when Lucas Lessio tapped in a cross crease pass from Dan Ciampini on the power play. Late in the frame, Dan Ciampini scored his fifth shorthanded goal of the season to grow the lead to two goals.
Midway through the second period, Kyle Morrison scored to put the Buzzers up 3-0. Just over a minute later, Mike Hawkrigg grew the lead to four goals before Tyler Forbes put St. Michael’s in front 5-0 late in the period.
A veteran on the team, Forbes explained that he feels the Buzzers are starting to peak at the right time of the season, now with four consecutive wins with just eight games to go.
“Like Nick Ciampini said before the game, we played this team in the second game of the season and we were scared and running around and they really took it to us,” said Forbes. “If you compare that game to this game though, we didn’t back down, we brought it the whole sixty minutes, every line was contributing and we certainly want to be peaking now heading toward the playoffs.”
St. Michael’s continued to pour it on in the third period with three more goals. Ernesto Valente, out of the line up since the beginning of the season as he battled back from an injury, scored in just his second game back when he one-timed a pass from Harry Howlett-Ben past Bruins’ netminder Aaron Green.
“Oh yeah, for sure,” said Valente, when asked if scoring early in his return to the line up will help to feel more comfortable. “It feels great.”
Valente agreed that the success the Buzzers saw in this game was due to the fact that they put forward a good, solid, hard effort and did not take anything for granted against the lower seeded Bruins.
“It was three periods of hard work,” said Valente. “They’re a last place team but we wanted to treat every team equally, we just came out and gave it our best effort tonight.”
Midway through the period, Dan Ciampini notched his second goal of the game followed by a power play marker from Mike Neville at the 17:12 mark to cap the scoring.
Jonathan Loparco won his sixth consecutive start for St. Michael’s turning aside all seventeen shots faced to record his first career Junior A shutout.
“It feels really great (to get that shutout) but the better thing is we’re on a nice little role right now as a team but it feels good to get that shutout under my belt,” said Loparco.
The Buzzers’ netminder though credited the defensive effort of his teammates in front of him for cutting down the number of quality scoring chances he was forced to face.
“The guys played really well tonight, they took away a lot of good scoring opportunities, they made them shoot from the outside a lot, they made it a lot easier on me,” said Loparco. “It was all them, it’s all about them, the guys in front of me got the shut out for me tonight.”
From the second period onwards, DePellegrin explained that the Buzzers’ defence did a much better job of stepping up at the blueline and instead of allowing the Bruins easy entry into the zone which occurred at times during the first period.
“After the first period, we were really harping on the defence to stop giving Seguin so much respect,” said the head coach. “We were backing into our goalie it seemed but the message after one period was to step up and to protect the blueline and not to give them so much respect. The defence, all six of them, started to do that a lot more consistently in the second and third and that’s a testament to the outcome of the score.”
