On Frozen Blog

Sky fire, sideways rain, and tree uprooting winds lashed and slashed at Central Pennsylvania an hour before faceoff Friday night, delaying the start of the Calder Cup finals by nearly 30 minutes, but it was the Hamilton Bulldogs’ flooding of the neutral zone that made life most miserable for the Hershey Bears in game one.

Carey Price stopped all 46 shots he faced, his teammates snuffed out all nine Hershey power plays and scored three times themselves while a man up, and Hamilton’s discipline and tempo-dictating trap sucked the life out of sold out and soggy Giant Center. The 4-0 final, and the 46-25 Hershey shots advantage, in no way reflected the complete control Hamilton enjoyed from late in the first period on.

With less than 24 hours to dissect and adjust, Bruce Boudreau must find an effective strategy for the defending champs to generate speed and advantage heading into Hamilton’s zone. When the Bears are denied their north-south superiority, and pinched into a horizontal attack against the Bulldogs’ sizable and mobile blueline corps, life for the rookie netminder is made easy. Game one’s 46 shots were about the easiest any playoff goaltender has ever faced.

“I don’t know if he sweats out there,” Boudreau said afterward of Price.

There’s some (small) solace in knowing that Hershey dropped last year’s Calder opener to Milwaukee before prevailing in six games, but the Bears certainly can not afford a repeat of Friday night’s complete special teams breakdown.

Matt D’Agostini opened the scoring at 1:21 of the second period, with Tomas Fleischmann in the box for a roughing penalty earned at the 20:00 minute mark of the first period. Mikhail Grabovski added another power play tally less than three minutes later, slicing through the Hershey slot with little resistance (a common theme of game one). But it was Corey Locke’s (2 goals, 1 assist) marker midway through the second stanza that ended any drama and put an exclamation point on the freedom that Bulldogs’ forwards enjoyed darting and dashing about Freddie Cassivi without Bears’ blueliners having much say about it.

Gathering the puck near his own blueline, Locke scooted up the left wing boards and deep into Hershey’s zone without drawing even a “hello” from Hershey defenders. His unassisted backhander high into Cassivi’s cage shamed even end-of-shift shinny defenders.

The contrast between Hamilton’s fleet forwards transitioning in lethal fashion off of their trap and Bears’ forwards bogged down in neutral zone frustration was a defining portrait of game one.

“We know they’ve got a lot more to give,” Hamilton head coach Don Lever said afterward. “That wasn’t their ‘A’ game.”

With a little more than two minutes remaining, a disenchanted Bears’ supporter could be heard chanting, “We want mayhem!” He got it alright. Nearly 60 minutes of message-sending mischief littered the ice with gear and stopped play for nearly ten minutes, while the referees sorted out the sordidness.

The problem was, a message of change most needed to be sent to Carey Price, who was standing idle 100 feet away.