The Prince Albert Raiders faced a much tougher push from the Regina Pats on Saturday, but still skated away with a 5-2 victory.
The Raiders hammered the Pats 9-2 at the Art Hauser Centre on Friday, but the rematch on Saturday in Regina was a much tighter affair.
“We felt there was some opportunities where we could have put some more pucks to the net than we did tonight, but give Regina credit,” Raiders head coach Ryan McDonald said. “They pushed hard off the start.”
Brayden Dube led the way with three goals for the Raiders. Two of them were empty netters in the dying minutes of the third period, but his first goal opened the scoring at 12:40 of the first period.
The Pats had outshot the Raiders 6-4 at that point, when Dube blew past two Pats players in a race for a loose puck, and beat Regina starter Marek Schlenker high glove side on a breakaway.
“We got our skating legs going,” McDonald said. “The first goal where Doober goes down and then busts through and uses his speed and fights through that check and then gets us going, that big first goal was a catapult at the start. Then the guys just kept going from there.”
Brandon Gorzynski made it 2-0 with less than three minutes to play in the first period to make it 2-0 Prince Albert. The Raiders made it 3-0 early in the second when a Daxon Rudolph pass deflected off Max Heise’s skate and into the net.
However, the Pats rallied for a pair of late power play goals to make things close heading into the third. Ruslan Karimov knocked in a rebound early in a five-on-three power play, and Zachary Lansard added another 34 seconds later to give the Brandt Centre crowd some hope after 40 minutes.
The Pats came inches away from tying things up roughly five minutes into the third when Lansard just missed getting his stick on a rebound at the top of the crease with a wide-open net. Instead, Raiders starter Steele Bass turned aside all 10 shots he faced in the final 20 minutes, and Dube iced the game with a pair of empty net goals to secure the hat trick.
“Really liked our response coming into that third period,” McDonald said. “We got back to our direct north play, got pucks behind, created chances off of our forecheck, and made them come 200 feet for theirs.”
The Raiders are back in action on Friday when they welcome the Swift Current Broncos to the Art Hauser Centre. Puck drop is 7 p.m.
