The two sides locked in a scoreless opening frame - one that saw the Checkers outshoot the Bruins 11-4 - but the action ramped up quickly in the second. Brendan Gaunce notched back-to-back tallies early on in the frame to put the visitors ahead, and while Nate Smith was able to get the home side on the board less than two minutes later, Ivan Ivan responded to once again push Providence in front by two.
The Checkers found a spark before that second buzzer, though, as Alex Petrovic threaded a point shot through traffic and in for a late power-play tally. Trailing by a goal with 20 minutes remaining, the home team rode that wave of momentum in the third - nearly doubling Providence in shots - but they couldn’t quite find the equalizer. Time eventually ran out, Providence netminder Jiri Patera capped off his night with 33 saves and the Checkers were saddled with a midweek split.
QUOTES
Coach Geordie Kinnear on the start to the gameOverall it was really good. I thought the power play for the first time, you want to get a little momentum because we’re going at the start, and then it kind of didn’t go our way and it kind of flattened the bench a little bit. Then I thought their power play gave them some juice on our penalty kill and then the game became even after that. I thought it was a really good hockey game for us but we didn’t get rewarded for it overall.
Kinnear on allowing three goals in the second period
I liked a lot of the game, to be honest. Sometimes they’re not going to go your way and it’s a process, and sometimes those results can skew what you think of the game. I’m not skewed, and overall I was pretty happy with how we played. I wish we would have won to reward the work that those guys put in, and I thought they stayed on it pretty much the whole game. We didn’t get rewarded for it, but move on and a lot to like.
Kinnear on building on this game
You’ve got to be careful because you do lose the hockey game and obviously there’s a lot we have to work on, but when you’re behind the scenes and you ask guys to do certain things and you see them … are we going to be perfect this time of year? Absolutely not, but we definitely moved the needle in some areas. Obviously there are some areas that we want to make sure we clean up that defensively haven’t been overall really solid and trending the right way, but things we talked about before the game, we saw today.
