Christopher Mast/Everett Silvertips

Silvertips douse Blazers for a second time; Ramsay shines in debut

When the Kamloops Blazers game planned for this game one would imagine they planned on having more than two shots in the first period.

Gianni Fairbrother (Photo by Christopher Mast/Everett Silvertips)

The Everett Silvertips have always been known as a defence first team with solid structure. When Dennis Williams took over the reins as head coach there was a thinking that the days of a strict structure were over, but that simply hasn’t been the case. The Silvertips deserved full marks for their 2-0 lead dominating the first period from start to finish. Everett defencemen Sahvan Kharia and Gianni Fairbrother finished the period with two assists each. After the game, head coach Serge Lajoie talked about the poor start “We chased the game right from the get go, I don’t want to say that our guys don’t care, i’m not faulting them for that… at times it seemed like we had five individuals on the ice. Not much coordinated team play, not much sharing in terms of the puck support.”

The second period was much of the same right from the drop of the puck as Everett had a goalmouth chance just 15 seconds in. They didn’t score on that chance, but they would score on most of their others. Everett had four goals in the second period, all but one the power play and two of them on consecutive 5-on-3’s. It’s clear that if the Blazers want to have any success against Everett they need to stay out of the box. “They got five power play goals, that’s two games now we found ourselves in penalty trouble and they just capitalize, it comes back to us as coaches we gotta do a better job of preparing them.” The Silvertips sixth goal would bring an end to goaltender Dylan Ferguson’s night as 17-year-old Rayce Ramsay would see his first WHL regular season action. Ramsay faced four shots in the remainder of the period, and save all of them.

Rayce Ramsay

For the first time this season someone not named Dustin Wolf played in goal for the Silvertips. Ex-Blazer Max Palaga started the third period, presumably to give Wolf a break as the Tips play in Seattle at 6:00pm Saturday. It would take 2 minutes for the Blazers to score on their old teammate as Ryley Appelt scored his first of the season. The remainder of the period belonged to young Rayce Ramsay who stopped all 13 shots he faced. “I was tracking really well and seeing the puck” Ramsay’s performance wasn’t a surprise to Lajoie “He’s a salt of the earth guy, he works hard for everything he gets. I’m so happy for him, he went in there and took advantage of it, he might have been a bit of a rallying point for our guys and he might have helped with our energy on the bench.”

Ramsay, along with Orrin Centazzo were big parts of what was a better third period for the Blazers “We had to do a reset to make sure we had something to build off, I thought Centazzo really had his legs in the third, there are definitely some things we can build off.”

Kamloops now has a day to fix pretty much everything, while Everett heads to Seattle, and then comes back to Kamloops on Sunday for a 5:00pm start.