Hawks Spring a Leak, News, HL - Major Atom - A4, 2018-2019, CHL Atom (West London Minor Hockey)

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This Team is part of the 2018-2019 season, which is not set as the current season.
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Feb 26, 2019 | GeoffRead | 687 views
Hawks Spring a Leak
The West London Hawks Major Atom A4 squad has a problem: it has allowed 12 goals in its past 2 games. On Sunday afternoon, the Hawks dropped their second straight game, this time by a 6-5 margin to West London D4. After the game the coaching staff was clear to the team that they would to do better defensively if they wanted to make any noise in this year's playoffs.

The game was a bit of a frustrating affair. As in previous matches, the Hawks put forward a pretty good effort on offence, but for some reason were much more inconsistent in their own end. Some defencemen were guilty of not turning against the rush soon enough; others left their man uncovered in front. Likewise, there were a couple of inexplicable decisions to put the puck weakly up the middle leading to turnovers and, on two occasions, goals against. As for the forwards, sometimes the backchecking was excellent, but at other times it seemed a bit half-hearted. To beat good teams the Hawks will need team-wide buy-in.

The Hawks had particular difficulty in this one breaking out against D4 whose strategy was clearly to overload the boards to make it hard to clear the puck out. The coaches have been emphasizing to the defence all year that when the way ahead is blocked, they should try to reverse the play behind the net and up the other side, but this option remains rarely exploited except by Aiden Hayes. The result was a series of turnovers that hurt the team all game long.

All that said, there were some bright spots in this affair. Player of the game James Nielsen had an excellent game working hard on the backcheck and scoring two goals, including a pretty one that saw him snake through D4's defence and score on a good low shot. His right-winger Owen Askew also had a strong game full of hustle and bustle, picking up an assist on Nielsen's first marker. A similar effort was turned in by Kaelan Walsh on the third line.  Brandon Miles likewise had a strong game, breaking up several rushes and reversing the flow back up ice. And the two defencemen who moved up to play forward, Anderson Watt and Andre Prato-Duran both turned in effective efforts and Prato-Duran picked up an assist. Watt, in particular, took the puck wide up the right side several times and either crossed the puck in front of the net or put a hard shot on net that bounced out front for a rebound opportunity. It was on one such play that Troy Price popped in his second goal of the game that pulled the Hawks to within one with seconds left on the clock. Paul Steele also got an assist on the player for having pushed the puck up the boards to Watt.

The other goal in the contest came off the stick of Nathan Mason who took a nice pass into the middle from Zoe Read and rifled it home. Gregory Nicolis also picked up an assist on the play for having headmanned the puck to Read. 

But on the whole it was something of an uneven game for the Hawks who will look for a more consistent effort in their next contest.

Go Hawks go!