Tuesday wasn’t a great night to be a Victoria Royal.
It wasn’t a great night for people who hate the song ‘Runaround Sue’ either.
The Prince Albert Raiders treated fans to a dozen separate renditions the 1961 pop classic’s opening bars while thumping the Royals 12-2 in front of nearly 2,500 spectators at the Art Hauser Centre.
“It’s a great song,” Raiders forward Aiden Oiring said afterward with a smile. “I love that and I want to keep it going. I love hearing it.”
The Raiders scored three goals in the first, two more in the second, and pumped seven past besieged Royals netminder Jake Pilon in the third for a one-sided win. Each tally was accompanied by the Raiders fog horn, and the dulcet doo-wop tones of the Dion DiMucci classic.
“I don’t think I could ever get sick of it,” said Raiders captain Justice Christensen, who started the music, er, scoring with a power play tally less than five minutes into the first period. “But, we did hear it a lot at the end there.”
The Raiders dominated right from the opening whistle. They outshot the Royals 15-1 in the first 20 minutes, and put three pucks past Pilon, including Alisher Sarkenov’s eventual breakaway game winner.
Oiring then made it 4-0 just 38 seconds into the second period, giving the Raiders an insurmountable lead.
“We managed the puck really well,” Raiders head coach Ryan McDonald said when asked about the strong start. “Any time they had some opportunities we tracked well. We got in front of pucks. We blocked some pucks to limit their shots on net.
“We just continued to play north, continued to play behind, and our guys continued to do a great job of owning that six foot radius around the net. In the offensive side, (we) got pucks to the paint and got rewarded for it.”
The Royals made a brief comeback bid following Oiring’s goal. Eli McKamey made it 4-1 with a smooth backhand over Raider starter Michal Orsulak’s shoulder. Ashton Brown then made it 4-2 when he tipped in a Henry Peterson point shot, but that was as close as they got.
Brandon Gorzynski made it 5-2 Prince Albert late in the second, and then the wheels fell off in the final 20 minutes. The Raiders peppered Pilon with 16 third period shots, and celebrated goals from Evan Smith, Connor Howe, Max Heise, Riley Boychuk, Matyas Man, Jonah Sivertson, and Oiring, who scored his second of the night.
“It’s definitely fun to see some of those young guys get on the scoresheet and score some goals,” said Oiring, who had two helpers to go along with his two goals. “It just shows how deep our lineup is. Every game, anyone can get on that scoresheet.”
As difficult as it was for the visitors, things could have been even worse. Heise just missed doubling his goal total when he fired a loose puck off the post while staring down an empty net.
The shot fooled entire sections of Raider fans and the team’s gameday production crew, who sounded the fog horn, forcing the officials to stop the game.
The Royals, who were coming off a 5-2 win in Regina on Saturday, struggled to keep up despite the favourable bounce.
“When you play good teams, you’ve got to play with a little more structure than we played,” Royals assistant coach Don MacGillivray said after the game. “We made a lot of mistakes. We had, pretty much up and down the lineup, guys not competing the way they need to compete to be competitive with a real good team.”
The Royals arrived in Prince Albert needing a win to keep pace with the Portland Winterhawks for the Western Conference’s eighth and final play-off spot. As of Tuesday night, both squads have 44 points, although Portland has played three more games.
Prince Albert was the third stop on Victoria’s Eastern Conference road trip. They play in Saskatoon on Wednesday, followed by stops in Moose Jaw on Friday and Swift Current on Saturday.
While out-of-conference road trips can be grueling, MacGillivray said travel had nothing to do with the poor showing.
“PA obviously have a very good team,” he said. “They move the puck extremely well. They have three lines that look like number one lines. They look like a really solid team and credit to them. They were the much better team tonight and we deserved what we got.”
“It sucks the way we lost, but we have a young team that’s learning how to play and clearly tonight we got some lessons,” MacGillivray added. “It is what it is. We’ll move forward and try to build on whatever we can and be better tomorrow.”
News and Notes:
• Jake Pilon went the distance in the Victoria goal, playing the entire 60 minutes. He finished with 25 saves on the night. Michal Orsulak had 14 saves in the Raider net.
• There were only three Raiders who finished the game without registering a point—two if you don’t count Orsulak.
• Ashton Brown not only scored one of Victoria’s two goals, he was also the only Royal to finish with a plus rating in the plus/minus column. Brown was a +1 on the night, while three other Royals finished even.
• Per the @WHL_History account on the website formerly known as Twitter, Tuesday’s victory marked the first time the Raiders have hit double digit goal totals since March 27, 1999. That’s when they beat the Lethbridge Hurricanes 11-2 in Game 3 of their opening round play-off series. The last time the Raiders scored double digit goals in a non-playoff game was Sept. 30, 1998 when they hammered the Moose Jaw Warriors 10-3 in Moose Jaw.
• The Raiders are on the road Thursday and Friday to face the Warriors and Swift Current Broncos. They return home on Saturday to face the Medicine Hat Tigers. Puck drop is 7 p.m.
