MOLINE, IL – After two matchups, the “Cold War on 74” between the Quad-City Storm and the Peoria Rivermen remains in no-man’s land.
After the Storm won the season opener in overtime last Saturday, the Rivermen evened the score in a big way, with quite a lopsided score. Peoria skated away with a 6-1 victory, quickly and repeatedly quieting a TaxSlayer Center crowd of 3,369.
Both teams stand at a win apiece, however the Rivermen lead the Storm in the SPHL standings, getting an extra standings point for an overtime loss. The rubber match to this three-game season start comes next Friday, this time at the Peoria Civic Center, with a 7:15 p.m. puck drop.
This loss certainly didn’t sit well with Q-C coach Dave Pszenyczny.
“We just didn’t play the first two periods,” he said, with the Storm managing just 10 shots — six in the first and four in the second. “It’s a little frustrating there.”
Making his first start, Q-C goalie Eric Levine, the tallest Storm player at 6-foot-3 and with the highest sweater number of 96, looked early on as if he could hold the fort against the Rivermen. However, when Lane King lost his stick after a collision near the boards six minutes into the game, he picked it up in time to find a loose puck near the goal, burying it with 14:19 showing on the clock.
The Rivermen made it 2-0 before the period ended, with Will Smith getting a nice feed in front of the net from Ben Blasko behind it.
“The difference between last week and this week is that we only had seven days of training camp,” said Peoria coach Jean-Guy Trudel, who played for the Quad-City Mallards long ago. “We were able to put more details into our game. We try to find the right combinations; we are a lot more organized.”
The game got away from the Storm in the second period. Quick scores after penalties proved to be the daggers.
First it was Peoria’s Brandon Rumble scoring just 16 seconds after the Rivermen received a lengthy 5-on-3 advantage. Then, with the guests up 4-0, Mike Gurtler scored a goal 43 seconds into Peoria’s fifth power-play opportunity of the first two periods.
“You always have to learn” from games like this, Pszenyczny said, “otherwise you make the same mistakes and just embarrass yourself like that again.”
Just as troubling for the Storm as not managing many shots for the first two-thirds of the game was that Peoria’s offensive game was just the opposite. Peoria had peppered Levine with 34 in the first 40 minutes and finished with 48.
Q-C switched to Peter Di Salvo, the winning goalie in the opener, in the third period. He faced 10 shots, stopping nine.
“The positive here is that we didn’t give up in the third period,” the Q-C coach said. “We didn’t pack it in.”
In fact, the Storm totally turned in around in the third, getting off 18 shots. They erased the shutout by Rivermen goalie Stephen Klein, with Q-C’s Ben Boukal getting an unassisted goal with 2:16 left in the game.
Trudel says that he uses the first four or five games of the season to get a feel for his team.
“It’s a blank picture” at the start, he said. “Now we are putting faces and bodies into that picture.”
Photo and text courtesy of official SPHL release
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