Focused on Game 1
All through the Ontario Hockey League regular season, Varady preached a “next game” mind set to his players.
So despite the Frontenacs statistically holding the advantage over the North Bay Battalion — more goals scored by Kingston and fewer goals surrendered — Varady isn’t changing his tune for their Eastern Conference quarter-final, which begins Friday night.
“Stats are out the window for me. It starts all over. It is zero-zero,” Varady said.
“The whole purpose at this time of year is to win four games.”
Varady even downplayed the Frontenacs’ success on speciality teams — Kingston was No. 1 in the league on the power play, scoring on 25.7 per cent of its man-advantage chances, and was second best at killing penalties, with an 84.7 per cent success rate.
“None of that stuff that happpened in the regular season matters. I know [the media] will talk about it, but from our team’s perspective, it doesn’t have any effect on what we are doing,” Varady said.
Stan Butler, the playoff-savvy coach of the Battalion, obviously is going to be preaching to his players not to make it a speciality-team series.
“Stan Butler has a tremendous amount of experience and success in this league. We have a lot of respect for the way they play,” Varady said. “We understand they are going to come in, play hard, and they are going to compete. They have guys that can make some plays. Goaltenders with some good numbers. All that stuff adds up to a tough series.”
The Frontenacs, of course, have goaltender Jeremy Helvig, who has been very good in his final OHL season, posting the second-lowest goals-against average in the league (2.68). Helvig was the reason the Frontenacs management decided to load up with deals that brought in Gabe Vilardi, Cliff Pu, Max Jones and defencemen Sean Day and Mitchell Byrne.
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