The University of Alberta Golden Bears are on their winter break until January. They ended their Canada West play for 2015 by completely dominating the University of Lethbridge Pronghorns in a two game set back on November 27th & 28th at the Clare Drake. The Bears won the Friday contest by a score of 10-1 in a game that saw fifth year Bear Levko Koper score two goals and continue a torrid scoring run (he scored a hat-trick and a single in a series against UBC the previous weekend). Koper added another goal one night later when the Bears again defeated the Pronghorns by a score of 4-1. The shots for the two games were 97-44 in favour of the Golden Bears. The U of A finished their first half of Canada West play with a streak of 8 wins and 2 losses.
Nationally, the Golden Bears finished the first half ranked third behind Acadia and McGill. Perennial eastern powerhouse UNB dropped to seventh, while two other Canada West teams made the top 10 rankings with Saskatchewan finishing 4th and Mount Royal squeaking into the top 10 and claiming the ninth spot. Alberta actually finished one point back of Saskatchewan in the Canada West standings with 25 points compared to Saskatchewan’s 26.
Jordan Hickmott managed to climb and claim sole possession of third spot in Canada West scoring (8g, 14A, 22pts, in 16gms) behind Manitoba’s Jordan DePape and Mount Royal’s Tyler Fiddler. Two other Golden Bears are featured in the top-10 of Canada West scoring with Levko Koper’s hot string of goal scoring vaulting him into fourth spot (9g, 10a, 19pts, 16gms) and line-mate, and CIS All-Star team captain, Kruise Reddick moving into seventh place (7g, 11a, 18pts, 16gms).
The CIS All-Star team Reddick will be the captain of take on the Team Canada Juniors this weekend and he will be joined by Bears’ defenceman Jordan Rowley (who is leading Canada West defensemen in scoring). The CIS All-Star team defeated the Team Canada Juniors in a shootout by a final score of 5-4 in the Saturday night game. Today’s game starts at 12pm EST (10am MST) and is being streamed at http://portal.stretchinternet.com/cis/. The University of Alberta Golden Bears actually defeated a similar Team Canada Junior preparation squad back in 2012 by a score of 4-1.
The Golden Bears are familiar with exhibition games and to finish out the semester, they traveled south and faced off against the NCAA Arizona State Sun Devils last weekend. The series was dead even, with the 5-8 Sun Devils taking the Friday night match in a shootout and then saw the Golden Bears win in the shootout Saturday night. However, despite the close scores, the shots on goal displayed a similar pattern to what we saw from the Bears earlier in the season. Alberta outshot ASU 40-21 in the Friday night loss and then again 43-18 in the Saturday night win.
The discrepancy in shots (83-39 in favour of Alberta for the weekend) and the quality of the Alberta side wasn’t lost on ASU coach Greg Powers. He stated after the Saturday night game:
We’re proud of our guys. That’s such a good team. I can straight up tell you, that if you would have told me we went into a shootout with that team, two nights in a row, I would have taken it all day. All day. They’re good. There’s a reason why they are the two-time defending national champions up there, cause they’re good. They are just polished and older. That series just made us better.
That is huge praise for coach Serge Lajoie’s Golden Bears. It is sad that an NCAA coach in the Southern U.S.A can see what many local hockey fans cannot; the Bears are as good of hockey as you’re going to see live in this market outside of the NHL. They’ve beat our national junior team and NCAA squads, yet most local fans view the CIS and the Canada West as an inferior brand of hockey.
Next Up
The University of Alberta Golden Bears kick off the second half of the season January 8th, with a weekend series in Winnipeg as they visit the University of Manitoba Bisons. The Bears return home January 15th for a weekend set versus the University of British Columbia Bisons.
Bears Post Game (sort of) Live, from Rich’s Garage
This post-game show was recorded after the Bears two game sweep of the University of Lethbridge Pronghorns on November 27th & 28th. Rich was unavailable, so this episode is “Live from Jory’s kitchen.”
The embedded SoundCloud player isn’t working, so you can find the audio for this episode HERE.
See you in 2016.
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