ORLANDO, FLA – It takes a player with talent and confidence to want the puck with the game on the line and the outcome hanging in the balance. Having the right amount of ice water in the veins is what makes good players great.
Orlando’s Jonne Tammela (left) and Corey Kalk celebrate Tammela’s goal in Saturday’s first period (Photo courtesy of Fernando Medina / Orlando Solar Bears)
Orlando Solar Bears forward Brady Shaw not only enjoys playing in the clutch, he thrives under pressure.
Saturday night at the Amway Center, Shaw took the game into his hands and scored the game-winning goal 1:21 into overtime to lift the Solar Bears (10-7-2-0) to a stirring 6-5 win over the Norfolk Admirals (11-7-1-1) in front of an announced crowd of 5,057. Shaw was not the only hero as Alex Schoenborn had his best game of the season with a pair of goals to lead the Orlando attack.
Still it was Shaw’s effort in the extra period that left the fans in awe. After Norfolk’s Taylor Cammarata nearly won the game with a shot that beat Solar Bears goalie Corbin Boes but clanged off the post, Shaw went for a length of the ice jaunt, seemingly beating all three Admirals on the ice before putting a move on goalie Ty Reichenbach and scoring his eleventh goal of the season. The Admirals argued that Shaw may have put the entire play offside at the blueline but their pleas fell on deaf ears.
“Three on three hockey. It’s fun. I think that’s why they implemented it and why they keep going with it,” Shaw said when asked about the sequence that led to the winner. “It is end to end and you’ve got to be careful of the odd-man rushes. I thought [Michael] Brodzinski did a great job getting back and kind of forcing Cammarata into an early shot. It was a loose puck. I picked it up and they gave me some space so I decided to take it.”
Shaw’s joy belied just how hard and gritty the game was and the back-and-forth nature of the contest. In fact, Orlando had three goal leads twice in the contest but the Admirals clawed back every time.
The game between the two South division rivals was chippy throughout as Norfolk, which has been one of the surprising early season stories in the ECHL, tried to intimidate its hosts. Orlando was more than willing to play that game and then some.
The Solar Bears struck first in the opening period as rookie Brent Pedersen showed the visitors that speed can kill. Taking a pass from Matthew Spencer, Pedersen took off like a lighning bolt, streaking into the Norfolk end before cutting to the net and tucking the puck around Reichenbach for his sixth of the season at 5:03.
The first fight of the night came nine minutes into the frame when Orlando’s Curt Gogol, who was the team’s emotional leader on Alzheimer’s Awareness night, went at it with the Admirals Luke Nogard in a bare knuckles brawl. The event seemed to juice up the home team as Mathieu Foget soon after went for a wraparound attempt on Reichenbach. The netminder made the original save but Schoenborn, playing in just his ninth game of the season due to injuries, was there to jam home the rebound for his first of the season.
“Things were just working tonight,” Schoenborn, one of four players sent to Orlando by San Jose said. “I felt good in warmups and I just came back from injury so I was looking for that first one, it happened and I just rolled with it.”
Solar Bears forward Brent Pedersen (white) drags the puck around Norfolk goalie Ty Reichenbach before scoring his sixth goal of the season in Saturday’s game (Photo courtesy of Fernando Medina / Orlando Solar Bears)
The hits for the Solar Bears kept coming and at the 11:18 mark, Shaw made a perfect pass from below the goal line to Tammela who buried a shot into the back of the net for his second and what looked to be a commanding 3-0 Orlando lead.
A year ago, Norfolk might have thrown in the towel at that point but this is a different Admirals team. After head coach Robbie Ftorek called a timeout, they quickly responded on a power play when assistant captain Patrick D’Amico got a members bounce as his attempted pass hit the skate of a defender and past Boes for his fourth of the year to cut the margin to 3-1.
Orlando quickly tried to put its skates on the Admirals throats just two minutes into the middle frame when Corey Kalk beat Reichenbach through the goalie’s five-hole for his second.
Faced with another three-goal deficit, Norfolk dug back in and restarted its comeback. Former Solar Bear Darik Angeli took a pass from Cammarata and laced a shot off the inside of the post to Boes’ right for his fourth to cut the margin to 4-2. Just over two minutes later, Nogard got a friendly carom off a skate to collect his sixth goal during a power play to bring the visitors within one at 4-3.
When D’Amico ripped a shot from the top of the circle to the left of Boes that the netminder never saw until it was past him, D’Amico had his second of the night and his team was back even at 4-4.
“We let them back in it,” Orlando Head Coach and General Manager Drake Berehowsky said about the collapse. “Parts of our game I liked but there was a lot of parts I didn’t like as well.”
Another Gogol fight – this time with Norfolk’s Jacob Graves – brought the home crowd back into the contest and the burst of energy came in handy. With just under three minutes left before the second intermission, Chris LeBlanc sent Schoenborn away on a mini-break. As Schoenborn got close to the net, he roofed a shot just under the crossbar for his second of the night to put the Solar Bears back in front.
“LeBlanc hit me on the far side and I got into the zone,” Schoenborn said about the play that led to his second tally. “I ended up looking and there was a big [open] corner on the right side so I just went for it.”
Discipline reared its ugly head early in the third when Shaw took a hooking penalty. It came back to bite him when D’Amico threaded a cross-crease pass to Ben Duffy for a backdoor goal. The score, Duffy’s third of the year, evened the game at 5-5.
The score was part of an onslaught from the visitors that left Orlando grasping for shots on net. The Solar Bears did not crack the shot clock until there was 12:43 left in regulation on the way to a five-shot final frame.
“There were lots of parts of the game that we didn’t play the way we should have,” Berehowsky said when specifically asked about the third period. “We over-complicated it I think. I think we tried to be too fancy and we’re not that type of team. We set up structure for a reason and we have to get back to it.”
Boes (31 saves) and Reichenbach (25 saves) stood tall through the final minutes of regulation with neither one wanting to give up the deciding score. They did their jobs, sending the game to overtime where Shaw played the part of hero.
Shaw, who took responsibility for his third period penalty that led to the game-tying goal, said that it was a disappointment to let a division foe (Norfolk) take away a point from the game no matter what time of year it is.
“We had a 4-1 lead tonight and ended up blowing it against a divisional rival and then ended up giving them a point,” Shaw said. “We have to try to avoid that as much as possible [going forward] and realize that early games like right now, it makes a difference. You don’t want to be standing there at the end of the year and saying we’re two or three points short. We have to try to have a playoff mentality all the way through the year.
Notes: Final shots were 36-31 in favor of Norfolk… The Admirals connected for three goals in five power play chances while the Solar Bears went 0-for-3, the fourth straight game Orlando has played without a man advantage tally… The overtime win was the fourth for the Solar Bears, the best in the ECHL… Orlando is now 8-0-0-0 when leading after two periods… The teams will complete their weekend set Sunday afternoon at the Amway Center. Game time is set for 1:30 p.m.
Orlando goalie Corbin Boes (left) and Etienne Boutetbattle for position with Norfolk’s Partick D’Amico dur Saturday’s game (Photo courtesy of Fernando Medina / Orlando Solar Bears)
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