A Washington Stealth Fan Blog
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Two games this weekend, so I better start with the previews early.
This is essentially back to back games with Portland, just with a week in between to regroup.
Watching last weekends game reminded me why I’m scared of the Lumberjax. They’re huge. Player for player they dwarf us. Last year they used this advantage and some hot goal keeping to beat up on us.
This year their defenders are still large but playing timidly, and they’re missing any sort of threat on offense. This combination is dooming them. They’re offense isn’t scoring and the defense isn’t giving them the opportunity even if they did get a scoring outburst. If they give up 17 goals to us that means they have to score twice their average (9 goals per game) to win. That’s not going to happen.
Brodie Merrill was back in the line up on Saturday and playing his aggressive style of proactive instead of reactive defense. You can see the impact he makes all by himself. Alas he’s out there all by himself regarding the effort and impact he gets from his teammates. Watch the video clip on the Stealth site and Burkholder runs right around two of the Jax defenders, TWO, and gets to the crease for an easy goal at which time the nearest defender is just getting there – way late for a slide. Pitiful.
Dallas Eliuk is playing like he’s 46 or whatever he is. I won’t be surprised to see Kinger in the cage this Saturday. They need something different than they had last weekend, and the last line of defense is a good place to start. Also, “trying” in the 3rd quarter would be a good idea. In the games I’ve seen the Lumberjax play this year they’ve come out the locker flat in the 3rd quarter, even less than flat. Giving up 4 straight goals would be flat, giving up 7 straight is less than flat.
On the Stealth side of the field there is less to cover because more went right. Our offense was clicking. I love seeing the emotion that Colin Doyle is showing when the offense scores. He’s truly in the game and it gets everyone to follow his lead.
For the Stealth defense, we get Kyle Sorenson back. Sterling Mitchell will probably get bumped from the line up, but I bet on Sunday someone else will need a rest and hopefully he’ll get another game in. Or maybe we’ll play him on Saturday to rest someone for Sunday. Sunday’s game will be mighty important since Edmonton is who we’re tied with. But that’s getting ahead of myself. Anyways, having Sorenson available will be quite nice because the young kid is actually one of our biggest players. So he’ll bounce off the Lumberjax players a little harder than our smaller guys.
Finally, this is only our second of three games against the Lumberjax, we’ll have a third game against them at the Rose Garden as well. So they’ll have the home floor advantage for the final two match ups, but I’m no longer scared of them. As long as we don’t look past them based on the first game, it’ll be two more wins for the Stealth to lock up a playoff spot which is the main goal this year.