An old foe made an unceremonious return to its old battle grounds.
The Coaldale Copperheads continued to have the Okotoks Jr. B Bisons number in the team’s first meeting of the regular season, handing the herd its first home loss of the season in a 6-2 contest Friday night at the Murray Arena.
“We have a lot of guys who are back from last year and hockey is a psychological sport,” said Bisons assistant coach Brad Baldwin. “And right now with the young guys and new guys to the team we’re trying to change that aspect of the game, that mentality, but unfortunately tonight it just creeped back in.
“They have our number and until we play a 60-minute game, it’s going to continue.”
Coaldale has knocked off Okotoks in the playoffs for four years running, proving to be the kryptonite to the 11-time Heritage Junior Hockey League champions over the past half decade.
“We try and prepare for each game the same way, but Coaldale we have a special rivalry with them,” said Bisons captain Kyle Harrison. “They’ve taken it to us the past couple playoffs so we tried to prepare for it like any other game and obviously wanted to get the win, but it didn’t work out the way we wanted it to.
“Coming into our rink, we want to make it tough for them to play and we didn’t do that.”
The Copperheads took control in the middle stanza as Jayden Smith scored twice and Levi Anderson added another, all in a four-minute span, to make it a 4-0 score.
The rivalry tilt then took a turn for the worse.
Okotoks forward Jason Horn was brought down hard on a slew-foot by Smith. The impact of the incident prompted the paramedics to be called and Horn was taken off the ice on a stretcher.
“I spoke to the paramedics on the ice,” Baldwin said. “It was his first game coming back from getting into a car accident. All of his extremities were working fine, he had consciousness, he knew where he was, he knew what happened. We just did the protocol and didn’t want to take a chance.”
The coach called the incident a dirty play.
“He wrapped him up and slew-footed him and what pissed me off was the push after,” Baldwin said. “Once he got wrapped up he had no way to protect himself, a dangerous play.”
Smith was called for the slew-foot yielding an automatic two-game suspension.
“That’s the kind of stuff that this new era of hockey is trying to get out,” Baldwin said. “There’s no respect in hockey anymore. That kind of stuff is not needed in Junior B, Junior A, NHL, anywhere. It’s just a lack of respect for each other.
“We’re still in it, there’s 35 minutes left in the game and he’s making a hockey play and the guy on Coaldale didn’t make a hockey play. I thought it was an intent to injure.”
During the delay in action, the Bisons were tasked with playing for their teammate and finding a way back into a game that was slipping away.
“First things first, we wanted to make sure Jason was okay,” Harrison said. “Once we got the word that he was and for precautionary reasons he was taken away we just get back to what we wanted to do, get pucks deep and bang bodies.
“We had a good couple of shifts there and then kind of fell off the wagon there.”
On the ensuing powerplay resulting from Smith’s major penalty, the Bisons got back into the game in short order with Devon Barlow and Dallas Otto scoring just 47 seconds apart.
Coaldale put the game away early in the final frame as Tyler Andersen and Brandyn Howg added late insurance markers.
“I said to the guys, take this, sink it in and don’t forget it, be prepared and look at them,” the coach added. “Basically they were making a joke of us, laughing at us in our barn. We have to return the favour.
“The weaker teams in our league, we dominate. Right now as a Bison group we don’t care about those games we win 8-1, 10-1, 11-1. These are the games you want to win, these are the games that are going to take us in the playoffs and right now if we keep playing like this it’s going to be a quick exit.”
Okotoks took care of business to close the weekend, hammering the basement dwelling Three Hills Thrashers 11-0 on Sunday at the Murray.
Rookie goalie Matthew Baba made 13 saves for the shutout in his first start.
Austin O’Bray and Jagger Thiessen paced the offence with two-goal efforts, Harrison, Kody Briggs, Nic Lush, Devyn Stewart, Nic Jordan, Brandt Black and Bryan Weber each lit the lamp in the blowout victory.
It’s a battle of division leaders this weekend as Okotoks (8-1-1-) makes the short trip north in a clash with the undefeated Airdrie Thunder. Puck-drop is 8 p.m. at the Ron Ebbesen Arena.
