Players and coaches with the CanElson Drilling Estevan Bruins junior A hockey team got together after their 7-1 road loss to the Nipawin Hawks at Centennial Arena on Sunday to make sure nobody is looking at someone else to be better.
Chris Lewgood, head coach and general manager of the Bruins, said every guy on the team including him and assistant coach Aren Miller has to take responsibility for their actions and what they bring to the table. He said the slump they are currently in stems from people looking outward for someone else to fix what ails them.
“The guys all agree that each one of us can contribute to turn it around and there’s lots of people (who) spoke up and had a few words (after the Hawks game),” said Lewgood. “But again the main message is that don’t look for someone else to fix it. Look within. And everybody has got to take a look in the mirror.”
The Bruins’ (14-14-0-1) loss to Nipawin (17-12-2) was their fourth in a row and fifth of their six-game two-weekend road trip up north. The Bruins fell 8-3 to the Flin Flon Bombers (13-12-0-4) at Whitney Forum the day before Nipawin, which followed a 5-3 loss to the Melfort Mustangs (21-5-2-1) at Northern Lights Palace on Friday. On the previous weekend, the Bruins lost 3-2 to the Bombers, beat the Hawks 5-4 and fell 5-2 to the Mustangs.
Lewgood said they deserved to lose every game on the recent three-game trip, noting multiple different breakdowns of different varieties led to the losses. He said when the other team scores that many goals you’re not going to win and the bottom line is they let the opposition score those goals and they have to own up to that.
The Bruins’ play in these losses was unexpected, added Lewgood, but at the same time it is easy for them to discover what went wrong through looking at video on each individual goal against and also different stages of the game.
“It’s not like we’re left scratching our heads,” he said. “We can easily go back to the video, show the guys what they’ve done wrong, identify some things that we as coaches could do differently, and move forward. I mean you can spend all day on what went wrong, but the key is identifying solutions to it and putting those to work.”
Lewgood said the Bruins’ next game on Thursday at Affinity Place against the Kindersley Klippers (15-12-0-1), whis is also Estevan Mercury Teddy Bear Toss night, will be about how they play and approach the game and not what the final score is. He said if they have a game on Thursday filled with breakdowns, that would be a major disappointment, but that isn’t the expectation.
“The outcome of the game is important, but it’s not as important as to how we get to the outcome,” said Lewgood. “If the other team plays very poorly and we squeak by with a win although we played poorly, that’s a negative. If we play really well and lose a game 1-0 because we hit 10 goal posts and did everything right, (but) we just couldn’t buy a goal, I’d take that over the opposite.
“At the end of the day, we need to win the game. We should win the game and we should do so by working hard and playing the game the right way.”
