Blades sweep 3 from Beast
The Florida Everblades swept the Beast back to Canada.
Kevin Lynch scored the game-winner 1:12 into overtime, prying his own rebound away from Brampton goalie Jordan Ruby and poking it into the net for a 2-1 Florida victory Saturday night at Germain Arena.
On Canada Night, the Blades (28-12) completed a three-game sweep of the Beast. It was a sweep of the series, and the season, since the two teams won’t meet again in the regular season.
Justin Agosta and Ryan Martindale had assists on the winning goal. Martindale started the winning rally with a shot, then got his own rebound and passed it to Lynch. It is Lynch’s eighth goal of the year.
“He was dead tired,” Blades coach Greg Poss said. “He was at the end of a long shift. Martindale made a nice move for the first scoring chance. He retrieved his own puck and found Lynch wide open. (Lynch) had a scoring chance and shot it in on the rebound.”
Poss has said it every time Florida has posted two wins in a row against a team: It’s tough to be a team three times. Until Saturday, the Blades hadn’t managed that.
“The first time we beat the same team three times in a row. We do it a lot, play a team three times in a row. It’s not easy,” Poss said.
Once again, the Beast outshot Florida (30-23), but not by the wide margins of the first two games.
Anthony Peters got the win in the net again for Florida in his 10th consecutive start.
“We obviously had some good goaltending from Peters again tonight, and some timely scoring,” Poss said.
The heat was on Peters late. A delayed penalty on Maxime St. Cyr let Brampton pull Ruby and put six skaters on the ice for nearly a minute. St. Cyr went to the penalty box with three minutes remaining, keeping Brampton with the man advantage. The Beast failed to break the 1-1 tie.
Everblades defenseman Rob Florentino played as a forward Saturday night. Florentino scored the game’s first goal early in the second period on a line with Martindale and Matt Willows, who got the assists. It was Florentino’s second goal of the season.
“He scored a huge goal for us,” Poss said. “He played forward as well as ‘D’ and that’s a huge advantage for us to have a swing guy like that.”
The Blades have been short on forwards with Evan Bloodoff sidelined by injury.
“It was a great team effort,” defenseman Matt Corrente said. “Both teams wanted it. We knew what we had to do and we went and did it. “We want to make it hard for other teams to play in our building.”
Twice Saturday night, the Blades played two men short. The results were mixed.
Corrente found his way into the penalty box for tripping just nine seconds into the game. Kevin Lynch joined them for cross-checking 41 seconds later. The Beast managed one shot during the whole man advantage, including a minute-plus of playing 5-on-3.
The next time, Florida wasn’t so lucky.
In the second period, Gabriel Desjardins was sent off for hooking, joined 42 seconds thereafter by Mark Nemec, who got two minutes for roughing.
Jeff Brown scored for Brampton during the ensuing two-man advantage to tie the game at 1-1.
Peters stopped Luke Pither on a breakaway in the final minute of the first period, Brown on a short-handed break late in the second, and Scott Howes in the third. Meanwhile, Ruby stonewalled Willows and made a diving lunge to beat Martindale to a loose puck in front of his net in the third.
“Both goalies were amazing tonight,” Everblades captain Matt Marquardt said. “That was a playoff game. Those are the ones you love to play.”
A key player early in the game was the Germain Arena ice. Fans were allowed to paint on the ice after Friday night’s game. Players were grumbling after Saturday’s pregame warmups that all the graffiti on the ice made the puck harder to locate. At one point early in the game, the players couldn’t tell the difference between an actual stick on the ice and the paint surrounding it.
The result? A grand total of 11 first-period shots taken by the two teams combined, and several turnovers simply because the players couldn’t keep track of the puck.
“I don’t really mind the reds and the blues and things like that,” Marquardt said. “But someone drew pucks all over the ice. I don’t know what was going on there. Nobody expected pucks on the ice. I started to pick one up. At the same time, both teams had to deal with it.”
Corrente, on the other hand, admitted that, “I’d have done the same thing,” drawing pucks on the ice.
“The first shift it was a little hypnotizing, but once you got into the game didn’t notice it at all,” Corrente said.
The paint will be gone by the next Everblades game.
Marquardt had something else to be excited about Saturday night. His brother Cory, a country singer in Canada, performed the Canadian national anthem “O Canada” before the game.
“It was really cool,” Marquardt said. “He’s never sung the national anthem before. He thought he’d like to do that for the fans. It was pretty special to us both.”
Florida doesn’t play again until Friday when the Orlando Solar Bears come to Germain Arena. The first 100 kids receive tickets to Disney’s Frozen On Ice, which comes to Germain March 17-20. The entire ECHL takes Wednesday and Thursday off for an “all-star break” even though the league isn’t holding an All-Star Game this season. There’s only one ECHL game Tuesday.