Photo: The Bandits celebrate their second straight league title Tuesday night in Vegreville. – Colin Budd Photo
By Colin Budd
If anything, Tuesday night’s league championship clincher against the Vegreville Rangers proved just how dominant the Lloydminster Bandits were this season.
After an admittedly flat first two periods of play, the Bandits calmed themselves down during the intermission, had a couple of discussions in the room about the power play and 2:31 into the third Joel Budd had knocked home the go ahead goal with the man advantage and the club never looked back.
Just like that they were on their way to a perfect sweep of the entire North Eastern Alberta Jr. B Hockey League playoffs, their 22nd win in a row overall and most importantly, their second straight championship.
“Their goalie lets out big rebounds, we knew that from the start,” Budd said after the game describing the game winner which saw him tap in a Lenny Thunderchild point shot that had been tipped by Lenny Young doing the grunt work in front of the net. “But at the beginning of the game we couldn’t get to those loose pucks, but in the third period all of a sudden those pucks started coming to our sticks off their goalie’s pads and I got lucky and got a couple.”
Budd also added the insurance marker midway through on the man advantage, which had put up a goose egg through 40 minutes – and worse was even killing their momentum.
“We weren’t even getting set up in their end,” said coach Joe Young. “We talked about it after the second period that our strength is when we get the puck back to the point and get shots on net.”
And that’s exactly what they did on both goals. The power play wasn’t the only difference though, the Bandits final 20 minutes were as close to pure domination as you’ll find this time of year, completely squeezing off any Ranger attempts at a comeback.
“Joe came in and said ‘listen boys this is the championship, this is for everything.’” said captain Ian McAllister. “And we all kind of looked at each other and figured out that we all better bear down and came out a totally different team.”
“We have a team that when we get you down, we bury you and make sure that you’re not going to get back in the series,” said Young. “They win one game, you never know how much confidence they get and they can go from there.”
The win capped off what has possibly been the most dominant stretch in Bandits’ history with the club winning every single game since the calendar turned over to 2010 and they now look ahead to defending their provincial crown.
“We have one more step ahead, another championship that we have to defend, so it’s not going to get any easier for us,” said Young. “This is something I want everybody to enjoy because you never know what’s going to happen in the future.”
For more on the Bandits, see Thursday's Source on newsstands now.