Jr. Caps Stop U15 Stars
After starting the placement round with a win and tie, the U15 Stars were anything but dominant in a 6 - 4 loss to a much harder working Jr. Caps team in Vienna on Friday night. The two teams tied last Sunday with the Stars unable to take advantage of their many chances and again on Friday the problem remained the same. Hugo Jansons on a tight angle shot from Emil Sztatecsny opened the scoring eight minutes in on the powerplay, after a viscious Jr. Caps boarding call put Captain Paul Hochmann out of the game with a bruised neck. The Caps answered on a five on three powerplay late in the period to pull even.
The second period turned out to be the difference with the Caps scoring three in a row to go up 4 - 1 before Florian Baltram from Sebastian Habernig and Daniil Ovchinnikov got his team back to within two with just one second left on the clock. The Caps were the better team by far in the period and derserved to be out front. Poor passing coupled with far too much individual play and some very bad decisions left the Stars wondering just what went wrong.
The third would start with some life for the Stars after the late goal but they were again unable to capitalize on their chances and a bad cross zone pass sent a Caps player in all alone to put his team back up by three. When Baltram scored his second from Jansons and Lukas Wilding a spark of life seemed to come back to the team and it looked like they would turn things around. The Stars began to show how dominant they can be and had several man advantage opportunities but just could not get the put to drop. Moritz Matzka finally scored from Habernig and Thomas Zitz with nine minutes to go to get his team within one and the push was on. The Stars now threw everything they had at the Caps net, but it would be the Caps who would take advantage of one of the few chances they had to add to the lead once more. A furious last five minutes saw the Stars try everything to score but on this night they were not rewarded and had to suffer their first loss of the season to a Caps team who played harder and smarter when it counted and deserved the two points.
Coaches Comments:
It is hard to understand why the team came out flat today but these things happen. We were just not ready to play as was seen in our preperation prior to the on ice warm up and the warm up itself. The hockey gods tend favour the harder working group for the most part and it was the Caps on this night. Again, we reverted to carrying the puck instead of moving it and missed too many chances with poor shot selections and missing the net too often. We made an awful lot of individual mistakes tonight which seemed to be punished every time. We did not clear the puck when we had the chance and lost it on the oppositions blue line instead of getting it deep which really hurt us. Lets hope we can get rid of some of these bad habits we've been displaying of late and back to a better, harder working game with less individual play and more teamwork to put us back on the right track.
Final Score: 4 - 6 (1 - 1), (1 - 3), (2 - 2)
