QUEBEC CITY. P.Q. -If you want to win hockey games your team needs to score goals. The Peoria Rivermen are third best offensively in the AHL after eight games with 27 goals for. They are behind the Hershey Bears with 44 and Wilkes-Barre Scranton also at 27 but with seven games played.
Rivermen head coach Davis Payne didn’t know his team was this best offensively in the league but on the other hand he didn’t consider his team as an offensive power but seemed very proud to have a balanced one.
“We are fairly please; we don’t consider ourselves a group of high skill or high powered offence. I like to think we work for everything we get and we try to apply enough pressure for our opponent to make mistakes in key areas to allow us scoring chances. I think we have lots of balance, I think lots of our guys are willing to work for their chances and it paid off. I’m surprise we are third, I didn’t know that,” answered Payne.
Having a very well balance offensive gives a coach lot of options as far as line combinations; he didn’t have to put all his eggs in one basket as the old adage said. “It give us lots of options as far as line combinations and match ups,” mentioned Payne.” It also gives us the abilities needed when the schedule gets tough like three in three or back-to-back nights. You know that you can play a full lineup and get contributions from everybody and that really takes the burden off first two lines guys and takes the extra burden off them and takes and makes match up through your opponent difficult because they can’t key on one line and take it out of the hockey game. That is the real benefit behind it.”
In their last three games in three nights the team faced Milwaukee losing 6-3 in very poor outing but ended the weekend facing the Erie Lock Monsters for a home and home series winning both times by the score of 5-2. In one of the Peoria Journal star articles written by Dave Eminian on October 27, 2008, Rivermen Captain Trent Whitfield said, “I didn’t think that would have happened with last season’s team which was too soft mentally.
He continued saying, “It’s just a preparation, we came off a week long layoff before that game (at Milwaukee) and we weren’t ready mentally to play. We should have known better, really, to get moving early in that game. ”
Contact the author at: serge.poulin@prohockeynews.com
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