Playing only 20 minutes of good hockey will get you beat most nights.
Especially when you’re playing the defending WHL champions at home.
The Medicine Hat Tigers used the old-fashioned rope-a-dope, to come away with a 6-3 road victory over the Prince George Cougars in front of 3,229 fans at CN Centre on Wednesday night.
Willie Desjardins’ band of Tigers withstood the Cougars best punches in the first period coming out even at 1-1 after the first period despite getting outshot 17-5.
Terik Parascak put PG on the board at 16:17 of the first period as the top power-play unit whipped the puck around and found a way to solve Tigers netminder Jordan Switzer.
Twenty-nine seconds later, Medicine Hat took advantage of one of many defensive blunders by the Cougars.
Noah Davidson accepted a stretch pass from Kyle Heger and made no mistake slipping the puck under the arm of Cougars import netminder Alexander Levshyn.
Whatever momentum the Cougars built up in the opening 20 minutes quickly evaporated as the middle period saw the Tigers clog up the neutral zone limiting the hosts to only seven shots.
Heger put the Tigers up for good at 6:18 of the second period as a savvy face-off win by Shaeffer Gordon-Carrol where the blueliner’s lethal wrist shot was too much for Levshyn’s glove hand to handle.
In the third, Levshyn did his best to keep the Cats close with several point-blank saves, but the attention to detail on defense was thrown right out the window.
Yaroslav Bryzgalov picked the pocket of Carson Carels, easily found his way into the Cougars slot and wired a wrister past Levshyn to make it a 3-1 Medicine Hat.
An equally as casual of an effort on the blueline resulted in another Tigers marker 20 seconds later as Kade Stengrim took a McCann feed, cleanly beating the Ukranian-born goaltender providing what was supposed to be the proverbial backbreaker.
Hanging on by a thread, the Cougars were gifted a late 5-on-3 man-advantage thanks to a Misha Volotovskii hooking minor and a Heger slash.
With the goalie pulled to give the Cougars a 6-on-3 advantage, WHL Player of the Week Kooper Gizowski buried a shot through the wickets of Switzer trimming the deficit to 4-2.
With over four minutes remaining, Cougars head coach and general manager Mark Lamb again pulled Levshyn in favour of the extra-attacker.
The aggressive move paid early dividends as Jett Lajoie drove hard to the net and floated a shot over the shoulder of Switzer making it a one-goal game at 4-3.
But, the theme of the night was defensive errors for PG and another one crept up at the wrong time as a Prince George turnover at its own blue line allowed Liam Ruck to flick the puck into an open cage.
To Lamb’s credit, he didn’t give up on the game despite the sub-par performance, pulling Levshyn again, hoping for lightning in a bottle.
It didn’t come.
Carter Cunningham picked up Medicine Hat’s second empty net goal in 43 seconds to ice the victory.
PG outshot the Tigers 36-27 but the story of the game was Switzer who was named the game’s first start turning aside 33 shots.
The lone bright spot in the loss was the Cougars going 2-for-6 on the top-ranked power-play.
Medicine Hat, who is in the middle of a seven-game road swing, improves to 8-4-0-0.
They travel to Kamloops for date with JP Hurlburt and the high-flying Blazers on Friday.
PG drops to 7-3-0-0 and continues its home stretch with a pair of outings against the Seattle Thunderbirds (4-6-0-0) Friday (7pm) and Saturday (6pm) from CN Centre.
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