Spencer Martin turned aside all 22 shots he faced Friday night in a 4-0 win for the Abbotsford Canucks (34-21-2-4) over the Ontario Reign (30-24-4-1) in the opener of a two-game series at the Abbotsford Centre.
The Canucks had four different goal scorers in their victory including Danila Klimovich, Marc Gatcomb, Vincent Arseneau and Nils Höglander. Ontario will conclude its first series of the season in British Columbia against the Canucks on Saturday at the Abbotsford Centre beginning at 7 p.m.
More from head coach Marco Sturm below.
The Canucks skated out to a 2-0 lead in the opening period by scoring twice in the back half of the frame, first on an odd man rush that saw Danila Klimovich snap a shot past Petersen at 13:20 before Marc Gatcomb slapped a loose puck in the Ontario end up high over the goaltender’s blocker at 16:07.
Vincent Arseneau added to the Abbotsford lead at 3:49 of the second, winning a race to another loose puck in the Reign zone before burying a wrister to make it 3-0.
Before the end of the middle period Nils Höglander capitalized on a 3-on-1 rush for the Canucks to extend the home team’s lead to 4-0 at 14:13.
Petersen was the story of the third, stopping all eight shots that came his way including some of his best saves of the night. Ontario’s netminder turned aside 26 shots overall in the contest during a losing effort.
The Canucks outshot Ontario 30-22 during the game, while the Reign had the only two power play opportunities of the contest, which both came in the first period.
Marco Sturm
On if the team was playing frustrated
Yeah I think frustration came as soon as it didn’t go our way. But that’s hockey, right? Sometimes you have to be patient a little bit and sometimes you just have to work through it and make sure you do the details right. We did it for like maybe 10 minutes and that’s about it. Then one mistake led to another one and all of a sudden we were out of it, totally out of it for 50 minutes. When it’s March and when it’s playoff time, you can’t win any games like that. That’s the biggest disappointment from the day for sure.
On how the team can get more confidence going offensively
Forget about offense, I think we have to make sure we do our job first. We can’t even break out so that’s why we don’t get any offense. Sometimes we rush it offensively, but again I think it starts in our end and starts with our mistakes we make over and over and we work on it, we talk about it, and as soon as the game starts it seems like it happens again. That’s something we have to get better at and learn. A lot of guys have to make sure they get better at it because we have guys here that want to play playoff hockey and then other guys, maybe they don’t or maybe they don’t even know. It’s a dangerous mix but we have to make sure we have a better team effort tomorrow.
On the play of Cal Petersen in the game
I told the guys when we were down 4-0 after the second period that Cal was by far our best player so that shows how we played.
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