The No. 8 Lakehead Thunderwolves scored a weekend sweep over the No. 3 Western Mustangs with a convincing 8-4 win Saturday night before 5230 noisy fans at the new John Labatt Centre in London; a record crowd for an OUA game. Lakeheads first line of Captain Joel Scherban, Jeff Richards, and Austin Wycisk proved lethal as Richards had 3 goals and 2 assists while Scherban and Wycisk had a goal and 4 assists each. Lakeheads other goals came from Mike Wehrstedt, Hugo Lehoux, and Jounni Kuokkanen. Westerns goals came from Craig Kennedy, Sal Peralta, Jason Davies, and Chris Clayton.
Western had an early first period lead but then the Lakehead offense exploded for six goals in the period. Though Western fought gamely, especially in the second, they could not recover from the big 6-2 Lakehead first period lead. Western outshot Lakehead 43-38 on the night. Lakehead was 2-5 on powerplay chances while Western was 2-6.
The Lakehead sweep makes the OUA Far West division battle even tighter as Western now has a 12-4-0-1 record for 25 points, Lakehead has a 12-6-0-0 record for 24 points and No. 10 Waterloo has a 11-6-1-0 record for 23 points Western has a cancelled game against Windsorin hand on Lakehead while Lakehead has a game in hand on Waterloo.
Lakehead and Western will do battle again in the final series of the regular season at the Fort William Gardens in Thunder Bay on Feb. 18th and 19th with the game on Saturday the 19th being televised on Thunder Bay Television CTV (Channel 314 on Star Choice Satellite TV across Canada) beginning at 2:00 pm EST and portions of the game will be carried by TSN as part of their Hockey Lives Here television special.
Both Lakehead and Western were playing with their full rosters (aside from injuries) this weekend as many of their top players had returned from representing Canada at the Winter Universiade in Austria. The Team Canada players from both Western and Lakehead were given a plaque of appreciation for representing Canada by the President of the University of Western Ontario in a pre-game ceremony.
Lakeheads first ever road trip sweep of the No. 3 Mustangs could go a long way in silencing some very vocal local Thunder Bay media critics who had been attacking the team and the Lakehead coach over Lakeheads four-game OUA and seven game overall losing streak; six of which were incurred while five of the top Lakehead players were in Austria playing for Team Canada.
Lakehead Head Coach Pete Belliveau said his team was inspired this weekend. We had some adversity and this weekend everybody showed up and played for each other; everybody contributed. Friday night we played great and the guys fed off that tonight and they were really fired up coming into the Labatt Centre. The team wanted to send a message that they are a pretty good team when they have all their elements. Grant McCune was solid in goal again tonight and it was a great team effort.
Lakehead heads to Guelph next weekend for two games against the Gryphons.