Troops plan playoff push
NORTH BAY, Ont. — With the calendar having turned to March, the North Bay Battalion is more firmly focused than ever on the looming Ontario Hockey League playoffs as the Oshawa Generals pay a visit at 7 p.m. Thursday in the first of three games this week.
North Bay has a won-lost-extended record of 34-23-3 for 71 points, second in the Central Division and fifth in the Eastern Conference, one point behind the Peterborough Petes in the conference. The teams are vying for home-ice advantage in an increasingly likely first-round playoff matchup.
The Battalion has six home games in its last eight on the schedule, with one of the road dates Saturday night against the Barrie Colts. The Troops complete the weekend by hosting the Sudbury Wolves on Sunday.
In their remaining eight games, the Petes have three at home and five away, including March 15 at North Bay.
Oshawa is 16-40-3 for 35 points, fifth in the East Division and last in the conference, but Battalion coach Ryan Oulahen isn’t letting the Generals’ season-long performance lower his guard.
“We’ve got a plan here today,” Oulahen noted Wednesday. “It’ll be a good video session, to show a lot of the things that Oshawa does really well.
“Believe it or not, probably since the trade deadline, they’ve been a solid hockey team. Especially watching them the last three weeks, they’re almost at a pace where they would have been a playoff team, so you can’t take them lightly.
“They play the game hard. They do some things that are going to challenge us again. They really try to defend well, so it’s not going to be one of those games where we’re going to have a ton of space. We’re going to have to fight through a lot of stuff, and that’s kind of going to be the message tomorrow against them.”
To explain the recent success of the Battalion, which has eight wins in its last nine games, Oulahen pointed to several players, including Ethan Procyszyn and Evgeny Dubrovtsev, wielding a hot hand, as well as the club’s emergence from a tough run of the schedule into the current home-heavy period.
Oulahen, who always expressed faith that Procyszyn would overcome the start to the season, when he scored once in his first 17 games, has seen the captain produce 11 goals and eight assists for 19 points in the last 12 games. With 28 goals and 24 assists for 52 points in 58 games, he’s approaching the career-best 34 goals he scored in 2024-25.
Dubrovtsev, with five goals and six assists for 11 points in the last eight games, now has 11 goals and 22 assists for 33 points in 60 games. He was recognized as the OHL’s Rookie of the Week for the period ended Sunday.
Oulahen said the Russian import is “feeling it with that confidence.”
“We have that tell, when he’s kind of stomping through the ice and just flying through the middle, he’s on. He’s such a strong, powerful skater, and I just love the intangibles he brings in terms of our systems. We want a lot of things kind of going through our centremen and being able to drive that ice, and he can do that for us. He develops a lot of room for himself.”
The Oshawa game features Casino Royale Night sponsored by Cascades Casino.
