NEWS PHOTO JAMES TUBB
Medicine Hat Tigers' forward Brayden Boehm stick checks Brandon Lisowsky of the Saskatoon Blades in the first period of a 3-2 overtime loss on Sept. 30 at Co-op Place against the Blades.
jtubb@medicinehatnews.com@ReporterTubb
When the ref’s arm raises and the Medicine Hat Tigers are heading to the penalty kill, there’s a lot of confidence they’ll come out two minutes later unscathed.
The Tigers’ penalty kill has worked at a high rate in the young WHL season, killing off 84.2 per cent of penalties, which ranks them in eighth compared with the rest of the league.
It’s a start on the special teams that assistant coach Josh Maser, who works with the PK, is encouraged by but isn’t resting on.
“The guys have been really battling, they’ve been really hard on the PK, winning battles, committed to the structure,” Maser said. “Most of the guys on it are experienced and have been doing it for a couple years now, so they know what we want. They’ve kind of embraced and are taking ownership of it, a lot of them. It’s good to see how hard they battle. The power plays are going to get better as the year goes on, so we have to continue to get better and continue to improve.”
The Tigers have a rotating group of regulars on the PK that is dependent on who is in the box or who was on the ice when the infraction was committed. Generally it starts with Shane Smith and Hunter St. Martin on forward with Rhett Parsons and one of Dru Krebs or Bogdans Hodass on defence.
Then the captain Tyler MacKenzie and Brayden Boehm step onto the ice, with the latter of Hodass and Krebs and Josh Van Mulligen. Rookies Hayden Harsanyi and Kadon McCann have seen penalty kill time at forward, as have Andrew Basha and Oasiz Wiesblatt. Reid Andresen works in defensively as well.
It’s a group that has largely filled the role for at least a season, something that goes a long way, Maser says, and starts with the 20-year-old defensemen in Krebs, Parsons and Hodass.
“They’ve kind of been through a little bit of the growing pains on it, those older guys,” Maser said. “Parsons and Krebs have been huge, they’ve always been good on it. They’re a year older, a year stronger and they’ve been able to read off each other and work as a four-man unit, which is really good. It’s been a lot of positives, but it’s still early in the year. I don’t want to get too ahead of ourselves here, we still have lots of work to do.”
Even when speaking about the penalty kill’s success this season, Maser was knocking on wood as to not jinx the progress they’ve had so far. As for the players, they take a lot of pride in being one of the top penalty kills in the league and enjoy the hard work that comes with it.
“A lot of penalty killing is hard work and that’s what we base our team off of, so that’s something we really pay attention to,” Smith said. “When you look at the penalty kill, it’s just as important as any other, we’ve all played penalty kill most of our lives.”
The Tigers’ PK has also become a bit of a power kill in a sense, as they’ve recorded four short-handed goals, a third of the way to the total of 12 they had last season.
Smith had two last season and has one of the goals this season on the kill. St. Martin, MacKenzie and Basha had the three other shorties this campaign. While the focus of the penalty kill is to stop the other team from scoring, and failure means they find the back of the net, Medicine Hat has adapted a fun approach to their PK with the help of Maser.
“He brings the fun back into penalty killing and it’s not just all serious things,” Smith said. “It’s getting the analogy in and having fun with it, that’s a big part of this game is having fun while you’re working but obviously it’s still business. I think we’ve done a great job with that this year.”
The motivating analogies used are being kept within the group but offer a light-hearted approach to what can be a stressful part of the game. Maser says the approach is about creating an identity within the group.
“It’s something for our team, something for the unit where we’ve kind of bonded together and have done some things, they’ve taken the identity on and phrased it,” Maser said. “You’ve got to be hard, you got to be tough to be on the battlefield and you have to be selfless. They’ve really embraced it and they’ve really got a desire to get on the penalty kill this year.”
The Tigers take the penalty kill on the road as they start their B.C. road trip Saturday at Kelowna against the Rockets. Before leaving, head coach Willie Desjardins said Czechia forward Vasyl Spilka is expected to make his Tigers debut at some point during the trip, but not against Kelowna.
