The Blades took a 2-0 lead in their best-of-seven Western Hockey League Eastern Conference semifinal series with the Red Deer Rebels with a 2-1 overtime win Sunday night at SaskTel Centre.
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The Saskatoon Blades find themselves in the driver’s seat, but in the playoffs, they know there can always be caution flags on the road ahead.
The Blades took a 2-0 lead in their best-of-seven Western Hockey League Eastern Conference semifinal series with the Red Deer Rebels with a 2-1 overtime win Sunday night at SaskTel Centre.
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The series now moves to Red Deer for the next two games, Tuesday and Wednesday. A fifth game, if necessary, would be played Friday night back in Saskatoon.
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“I thought they (Rebels) had a really good push-back from Game 1,” said Blades defenceman Ben Saunderson, who was the OT hero in Game 2 Sunday.
“The series is long from over. There’s still a lot of games to be played. I think our mentality going in there is doing the same thing we did the last two games here. If you go in there, play our game, it should be good.”
Saunderson netted the game-winner at 17:01 of overtime Sunday with what he admits was the biggest goal of his career.
“For sure, a goal like that is definitely something I’ll remember for a while,” said Saunderson, who scored five goals during the regular season. “To be honest, I didn’t see it (go) in; I just heard the crowd.”
The SaskTel crowd of 8,051 fans cheered as a streaking Saunderson jumped into the slot area and found the puck on his stick after a centering pass from Trevor Wong. A sprawling Saunderson then rifled a shot past Rebels goalie Chase Wutzke.
Fraser Minten had the other goal for Saskatoon, which outshot Red Deer 49-25.
Wutzke nearly stole a road game for the Rebels, making 47 saves on the night.
“Over the course of a playoff run, you’re going to run into that,” noted Blades head coach Brennan Sonne. “Teams that are left are going to get good goaltending, because if you don’t get good goaltending, you won’t be still playing. You’re going to run into that. You’ve just got to stick with it and not get frustrated and move on to the next shift.”
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Rebels interim head coach Dave Struch said he liked his team’s bounce-back game after a disappointing and somewhat emotionless Game 1.
“I think (Game 1) from the other night was like a regular-season game played in the first month of the year,” offered Struch. “(Game 2) was a playoff game played against a good team.
“We say that defence wins championships and I think that, for the first 40 minutes, we played really good without the puck against a high-end team, the way we wanted to play. I know we didn’t get the shot total that we needed to win a hockey game, but the third period and overtime, I thought we played a great playoff game.”
Struch said Wutzke, a former Saskatoon Contact from Debden, was “fantastic” in net.
“He gave us a chance,” said Struch. “You’ve got to give (the Blades) credit. They’ve got a real good team and some high-end players that create those shots, but overall, for Chase to play the way that he did in a bounce-back game for us, he gave us a chance.”
The Blades, who at one point held a 17-3 edge in shots, led 1-0 going into the third period before former Saskatoon Contact forward Kalan Lind knotted the score at 1-1, on the power play, at 4:10 of the third.
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That’s the way the score was until Saunderson’s heroics in OT.
“We need the exact same effort that we had (Sunday), bottle up this energy that we had in the third period especially, and overtime, and pour it onto the ice,” said Struch.
Sonne was also happy with his team’s play in the third and OT.
“Third period and overtime, I thought we finally got the level of desperation needed and we need to keep that going,” he said.
“I don’t think momentum carries game to game. I don’t even think it carries period to period. I think momentum is more shift to shift, honestly.”
BLADE BITS: The Blades welcomed back forwards Easton Armstrong and Rhett Melnyk into the lineup but lost Armstrong early in the third period after he was assessed a five-minute major for charging and game misconduct after a head-on collision with the Rebels goalie Wutzke.
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