I hope you all had a great holiday season and are ready to once again hear about Johnnie Hockey. We had our first two games of 2019 this past weekend. These were our first games since December 8th giving the guys almost a month between hockey games. With that, we won both games against Bethel with a 5-1 win on Friday at home and a 3-0 win Saturday night on the road.
We played one of our best games of the year on Friday night getting the 5-1 win. The shots on goal in this game were 55-11 and the shot attempts were 98-17. To give you some perspective, we chart our goalie touches throughout the game and on this night our goalie only touched the puck 13 times. This was one of the most dominating performances that I have been a part of in my 11 years here at SJU.
We knew it was going to be a different game down at Bethel the following day. Their rink has always been a tough place to play and this night was no different. We still ended up getting the 3-0 win, but Bethel had several great chances and Andrew Lindgren had to really step up his game to help us get the win. A lot of these chances came on a penalty kill late in the game. We had a two-goal lead with eight minutes left in the game and one of their players ran into our goalie. Our guys took exception to it and went after the player. We ended up taking a four-minute penalty and a two-minute penalty in the situation putting us down 5 on 3 for two minutes and 5 on 4 for an additional two minutes. We could see it in Lindgren’s body language that he was ready for the challenge and we managed to kill the entire four minutes to keep the two-goal lead.
We had a huge performances from Andrew Lindgren (1 goal against on 37 shots), Brady Heppner (2 goals 2 Assists) and Evan Okeley (16 shots on net and +3). Overall it was a good weekend for our team and a great start to 2019.
This weekend we travel to Wisconsin to play two games against WIAC opponents. On Friday night we play Eau Claire #3 ranked team in the country and on Saturday we travel to Steven’s Point #1 team in the country. To say the least this is going to be a huge challenge for our team, but exactly what we need. These are going to be playoff style games and we need to get better against top tier teams in the country. We have some big games through the rest of the season and this weekend will go a long way in preparing us for these upcoming challenges.
Thanks for taking time to follow Johnnie Hockey and I hope to see you at a game soon.
