Wolves Open Series with Loss

After over a week off, the Sudbury Wolves and the Mississauga St. Michael’s Majors opened their 2011 Eastern Conference Semi-Finals series at the Hershey Centre in Mississauga on Friday night.

The Wolves found themselves in a hole early in the game as the Majors scored 3 unanswered goals in the first period from Casey Cizikas, Devante Smith-Pelly and Jordan Mayer. The Pack were outshot 21 – 8 in the frame.

The Majors continued their offensive assault – adding 5 more goals by the 12:43 mark of the second period.  Scoring for the Majors were Smith-Pelly with his second of the game, Corey Bureau, Maxim Kitsyn, Riley Brace and Chris DeSousa.

Down 8 – 0, the Wolves could do nothing but regroup and continue on, and as in previous games, showed that they should not be counted out.

The Pack hit the board less than a minute after the Majors 8th goal in the second period with MICHAEL SGARBOSSA (RYAN HANES) scoring his 5th goal of the playoffs.  The Wolves added another one before the end of the frame on a beauty from MIKE LOMAS (ERIC O’DELL) in the final minute.

The momentum found its way the Wolves side as they added 3 more goals by the midway point of the third period, however, time was not on their side as the Wolves lose game 1 of the series by a final score of 8-5.  Rounding out the scoring for the Wolves were O’DELL with two markers (MATHEW CAMPAGNA, MIKE LOMAS) (CAMPAGNA, JUSTIN SEFTON) and JOSHUA LEIVO (ANDREY KUCHIN, MICHAEL MACDONALD) netting his 5th goal of the playoffs on the powerplay.

Starting netminder ALAIN VALIQUETTE was replaced in the second period with JACOB RILEY, and then later re-entered the game.  VALIQUETTE AND RILEY combined to make 38 saves in the loss, while JP Anderson made 25 saves for the win.

The series now shifts to Sudbury for Game 2 on Sunday night at the Sudbury Arena.  Game time is 7:05pm.