ORLANDO, FLA – If there is anything that new Orlando Solar Bears head coach Anthony Noreen has taught the fans, players and media, it is that he is a no-nonsense personality when it comes to excuses. Try to make one and he will dismiss it quicker than a Bobby Hull slap shot.
Tuesday night, he may have been even faster.
Denver Manderson scored his first goal since returning to the Solar Bears lineup on Thursday night (Photo courtesy of F. Medina & G. Bassing/Orlando Solar Bears)
Two days removed from returning from a five game road trip, the Solar Bears returned to the ice at the Amway Center and did not fare well, losing to the South Carolina Stingrays 6-3 in front of an announced crowd of 5,559. David Pacan led the way for the Stingrays (9-6-1-1, 20 points) with a third period hat trick.
Orlando (8-4-1-2, 19 points) started off slow and dug itself, especially in the second and third periods when South Carolina scored three times each. Despite the idea that the long trek from Cincinnati to Orlando (almost 900 miles and more than 13 hours by bus) with one day off in between played a role, Noreen was not ready to concede that the travel schedule was a cause.
“Did it (travel) possibly [create a tired team]? Yes but there’s no excuse. You show up, you put the gear on, you go to work. That was made known to the guys. That’s something we need to learn,” Noreen said after the loss. “This is your job. You show up [and] you go to work. You’re sick, you’re tired, you’re hurt – that’s hockey. You’re never going to be 100 percent. You show up [and] you go to work.”
Given the success of the road trip (Orlando went 3-0-0-2), it was presumed that the confident Solar Bears team of the last two weeks would show up. Instead, it was the visiting Stingrays who had the early jump. A 9-2 shot advantage for South Carolina in the first eight minutes with goalie Rob Madore keeping the Stingrays off the board did not sit well with the home crowd. As the opening period wore on, Orlando got its legs going and got South Carolina netminder engaged in the game but the frame ended in a scoreless tie.
What the first stanza lacked in scoring was made up for in the second as the teams took seven minutes to equal the total regulation time goal output from two full meetings at the start of the road trip. It all began at the 2:14 mark when Brett Findlay outhustled a Stingrays defenseman to negate an icing. As he did that, Denver Manderson was streaking down the middle of the ice unmarked by a defender. Findlay put the puck on Manderson’s stick blade and Dekanich could only watch as Manderson went five hole for his first goal of the season.
Two minutes later, Solar Bears defenseman Mark Louis took a pair of minor penalties, creating a four minute power play for the visitors. Blanked by Orlando on seven chances two weekends ago, the Stingrays quickly made amends when Brenden Ellis beat Madore with a long shot through traffic for his third of the year and Brett Cameron scored his fifth of the season off a face-off win by teammate Andrew Rowe to put South Carolina ahead. The two man advantage goals came in the space of 1:22.
Orlando answered 57 ticks later when Eric Bradford and Findlay played a little give and go game that resulted in Findlay’s eighth goal of the season at the 7:01 mark. South Carolina’s power play got the lead back for good with just over seven minutes left in the period when a hard around the boards by Ellis took a bad bounce on Madore, leaving the netminder below the goal line and the puck on the stick of Austin Fyten. Fyten beat Madore, who was diving back into the net, with a backhander for his second of the 2015-2016 campaign.
“For the most part I think we battled pretty hard,” Findlay said. “The game was a 2-2 tie until that kind of weird bounce there in the second.”
Playing with the lead after two periods is something the Stingrays do well, having gone 8-0 this season to date in such situations. They clamped down on Orlando’s offense, allowing the home team just two shots on Dekanich (24 saves) in the first seven minutes of the third. A power play at the eleven minute mark of the frame became the Stingrays fourth man-up tally when Pacan went far side from the base of the circle to Madore’s right with just one second left on the advantage. When Pacan went high to the Orlando goalie’s glove side at the 14:29 mark, South Carolina was up by three and the Stingrays forward had his second goal of the game and the season.
The Solar Bears dug in and Eric Faille pulled them within 5-3 when he tipped in a shot by Brenden Miller with a little over two minutes left. With Madore (34 saves) pulled for an extra attacker, Pacan completed his hat trick with a shot from just over the center ice line with 51.1 seconds left to create the final score.
Noreen, who had parlayed an aggressive approach to penalty killing into the second best kill rate in the ECHL prior to Tuesday, gave the Stingrays credit for their approach that nearly doubled Orlando’s power play goals allowed in one night.
“To their credit, I did think that what they did was they scored ugly. Obviously we’re going to be a team that is going to go after them and attack,” he said. “I thought their plan was ‘hey, we’re going to get it to the net, we’re going to have five [players] and you’re going to have four, let’s make it a battle’. Obviously the third one [was a bad bounce]. The fourth one you get a three-on-one rush down. You miss it and they come back the other way. We’re going to live and die by that. We’re never going to tell our guys not to join in the rush short-handed to worry about getting back up the other way. The first two we’ve got to sharpen up on. The first one’s got to get blocked and the second one was bang-bang off a face-off. Those are details that win and lose you big hockey games.”
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