Spokane Chiefs win another 2-1 game
The Spokane Chiefs got the maximum results out of 180 minutes – and 14 seconds – of hockey in three days.
Kailer Yamamoto scored 14 seconds into overtime Sunday as the Chiefs capped a weekend of three consecutive 2-1 victories by holding back the Kamloops Blazers (11-10-3-2) at the Arena.
The Chiefs (12-7-3-0, 27 points) posted the other 2-1 wins on the road, Friday at Seattle and Saturday at Tri-City. Yamamoto, a Mead High student, also had the winning goal on Friday and has three overall during his first Western Hockey League season.
Spokane outshot Kamloops 40-19 during regulation, but Blazers 17-year-old goaltender Connor Ingram turned away every challenge except for Liam Stewart’s second-period goal on a sharp-angle shot on the Chiefs’ 30th attempt. Dallas Stars draftee Cole Ully tied the game for Kamloops a little more than 4 minutes later.
The Chiefs put the rush on Ingram as soon as OT started, taking advantage of one of his rare misplays on the night. Ingram went down and left the net open after stopping Jason Fram’s initial shot.
“I saw a good shot from (Fram) off the pad,” Yamamoto said. “Luckily, the puck came out to the middle and no one was there and I just pounced on it and scored.”
“They were all defensive battles and it’s not like we didn’t have chances,” Chiefs coach Don Nachbaur said of the weekend. “We had a ton of chances last night and we had a ton of chances tonight. We have to work on scoring, but, you know what, we won the game the way to talk about, getting pucks to the goal, banging in rebounds.”
Spokane defenseman Evan Fiala did his kind of banging, shattering the glass in Section 117 with a hard check on Jermaine Loewen with 14:37 left and the game tied at 1. The cleanup, glass replacement and ice repair took 15 minutes and resulted in five penalties and a Chiefs power play.
Spokane finished 0 for 6 on power-play chances while the Blazers never had the man advantage. Spokane’s last game without allowing a power play was Feb. 12, 2013, against Kootenay.
“I’m not worried about it,” Nachbaur said of the power-play drought. “We didn’t shoot the puck quick enough and we didn’t get flurries that we needed to. That’s something that’s not a concern. What’s a concern is not that we didn’t score, but, for me, that we won. That’s the bottom line.
“We gutted it out. We dug deep and it’s a credit to our guys. I’m proud of them that we came up with the results that we did. It was a team effort. We didn’t play two lines, we played all four lines through the three games and we knew we had to.”
The Chiefs have won four of their last five games, including a 4-2 win over Kamloops on Nov. 14. Spokane and the Blazers will meet two more times this year.
Notes
Spokane’s injured players are: defenseman Tyson Helgesen, upper body, 2-3 weeks; forward Devon McAndrews, upper body, 3-5 weeks; and D Colton Bobyk, lower body, 3-5 weeks. … The Chiefs will host Victoria on Wednesday. The teams haven’t met since the Royals swept Spokane in the first round of the 2013-14 WHL playoffs.