ORLANDO, FLA – With a nod to the upcoming Halloween holiday, the Orlando Solar Bears decided to wear specialty jerseys depicting the spread of a zombie virus through the team in Saturday night’s home game against the Atlanta Gladiators. Based on the results from the contest at the Amway Center, someone may want to get the team doctors to check for an actual illness.
Orlando’s Johnny McInnis (white) battles Atlanta goalie Matt Ginn for the puck (Photo courtesy of G. Bassing & F. Medina / Orlando Solar Bears)
Led by the two goal, four point effort of captain Derek Nesbitt, the Atlanta Gladiators (4-3-1-1, 10 points) dispatched the host Solar Bears (1-3-0-0, 2 points) 8-2 in front of an announced crowd of 5,329. Trevor Mingoia chipped in with a pair of scores and seven others joined in with at least a point for the visitors in the rout.
The loss, Orlando’s second in as many nights to its South Division rival, w as just as perplexing as Friday’s defeat. The Solar Bears posted their second straight 50-plus shot game only to see the effort go for naught.
“Over the course of the game, I think we probably made eight or nine mistakes and every single one went in the net,” Orlando head coach Anthony Noreen said after the loss. “It’s life. Sometimes it just goes that way.”
The avalanche of goals for the Gladiators started just 2:14 into the opening period. Mingoia skated into a pass from Brock Higgs and put a missle past Solar Bears starting goalie Ryan Massa for his second of the season. Just under four minutes later, Bryan Cameron’s shot from the point during an Atlanta power play hit the boards behind the Orlando net and started to bounce back toward the front of the cage. It took a weird hop over the stick of an Orlando defenseman right to Mingoia who buried it at the 6:07 mark.
A little over a minute after Mingoia’s second of the game, Thomas Frazee got into the act. He got behind the defense, took a pass from Nesbitt and broke in alone. Frazee was able to freeze Massa before going top corner on the goalie’s stick side for his third goal in two games and a commanding three score lead.
While that was going on at one end, Gladiators netminder Matt Ginn, who had just returned from a callup to the AHL’s Providence Bruins, was facing some serious heat from the Orlando offense. Much like Jay Williams the night before, Ginn was in the zone as he stopped all 17 Solar Bears shots in the first period to make the lead look that much more difficult to close.
Noreen showed great confidence in Massa when he sent the second year goalie back out to begin the middle frame. It took just twenty seconds to the Gladiators to connect again as Frazee won an offensive zone face-off back to Nesbitt who ripped a quick shot past Massa through a partial screen. Nesbitt’s fourth tally of the year was Massa’s last of the night allowed as Noreen replaced him with Kasimir Kaskisuo between the pipes.
“[I was] trying to change momentum. Sometimes you change things up and you hope for a spark,” Noreen said about the move. “It didn’t exactly go that way tonight.”
The rookie goalie did not fair much better. Thanks to a perfect stretch pass from Cameron, Nesbitt got past the Orlando defense and whistled a shot to the far side from the circle to Kaskisuo’s right at the 8:26 mark to push the lead to 5-0.
At that point, things began to get chippy and finally broke out when Orlando’s Bryan Moore challenged Atlanta’s Patrick McCadden to a fight. That was followed by Solar Bears forward Brett Findlay getting tangled up with Ginn and Dalton Reum with Ginn and Findlay picking up roughing calls.
The Gladiators took advantage of a subsequent Orlando penalty to pick up a power play goal when Higgs cleaned up the rebound of a shot by Ben Marshall that Kaskisuo stopped. The Solar Bears finally got on the board in the dying seconds of the frame when Joe Perry notched his third goal in two games, tapping in a perfect cross-crease pass from T.J. Foster.
“[It was a] pretty strange game. It was a little bit similar to last night where I think we took a lot of the play to them,” Perry said about how the game played out. “They took advantage of their opportunities and we didn’t take advantage of ours.”
Former Solar Bear Tyler Murovich scored his second goal in as many nights 3:13 into the final stanza, taking the puck into the Orlando end and beating Kaskisuo high to the blocker side from the circle to the goalie’s left.
Moore squared off with Atlanta’s Drew Baker midway through the period in an attempt to fire up the crowd and his teammates. It worked for a brief time when Findlay was able to find Eric Baier in the slot and the Solar Bears’ captain netted his first goal of the season but Marshall answered back 32 seconds later, beating Kaskisuo between the legs for what would be the final goal of the evening.
Noreen said that despite the second straight loss, he has confidence that the team will get better. He added that even more importantly, the players have confidence in each other that better days are ahead.
“There was no blaming, there was no complaining, there was no finger pointing. [The] guys know we’ve got to get better,” Noreen said. “Obviously there’s a ton to work on as there would be if we were the team that won 8-2. We’ll stay together [and] we’ll get better. We believe in this group. We’ve got to be better and we’ll find away to win games.”
Notes: Orlando has now strung together seven consecutive periods with at least 15 shots on net…The Solar Bears went 1-for-8 on the power play while Atlanta finished 2-for-7 with the man advantage. Orlando will spend the next week on the road with visits to South Carolina (Tuesday), Greenville (Thursday and Friday) and Atlanta (Saturday) on the schedule. Thursday’s game against the Swamp Rabbits is a school day special with a start time of 10:35 am.
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