The Toronto Marlies took advantage of 10 power plays to score four power play goals and defeat the Laval Rocket 6-2 to even their best-of-five series at one game apiece.
”You can’t give up 10 power plays and expect to win the game,” Laval Rocket head coach Pascal Vincent said.
The Rocket opened up a 2-0 lead with goals from Laurent Dauphin and Joshua Roy 1:24 apart, with Roy’s goal coming on the power play. They had an 11-3 advantage in shots at the time of Roy’s goal.
It all unraveled from there for the Rocket. Just 12 seconds after Roy’s goal, he took a penalty, allowing Toronto to make the score 2-1 on a goal from Logan Shaw.
”We took a penalty right after the second goal, and it fell apart,” Vincent said. “That’s the story of the game. I won’t lie and say it was the forecheck or the penalty kill, it’s bad penalties, that’s it.”
The Rocket took four more penalties in the second period, and the Marlies made them pay scoring twice with goals from Vinni Lettieri and Luke Haymes.
It was only a one-goal game going into the third period, but only one minute into the third Easton Cowan drove through the Rocket zone and put a backhand past Kaapo Kähkönen to make it 4-2. Things continued to go from bad to worse for Laval. With the Rocket on the power play, Vincent pulled Kähkönen but Cedric Pare put the game out of reach with an empty-net shorthanded goal.
After a melee that saw six penalties called, William Trudeau took a cross-checking penalty to give Toronto a five-on-three where Noah Chadwick scored the Marlies’ final goal with 1:42 remaining.
Vincent said that in the playoffs, you have to expect that you will get hit or tripped without a call but you need to control that frustration and that his team didn’t do a good job at that, and he’s looking forward to seeing how they will respond.
The two teams will now head to Toronto where the next two games will be played. The Rocket will have to win at least one in order to get the series back to Laval as it is now a best-of-three.
Lineup
There were no changes to the lineup from Game 1 on Friday.
Samuel Blais-Laurent Dauphin-Alex Belzile
Sean Farrell-Owen Beck-Joshua Roy
Jared Davidson-Lucas Condotta-Vinzenz Rohrer
Luke Tuch-Florian Xhekaj-Tyler Thorpe
Luke Mittelstadt-David Reinbacher
Tobie Bisson-Josiah Didier
William Trudeau-Marc Del Gaizo
Kaapo Kähkönen
Hunter Shepard
Full Highlights
