After facing the Kimberley Dynamiters on Friday and the Fernie Ghostriders on Saturday, the Castlegar Rebels are now on a three-game losing streak, but the team’s coach and general manager is optimistic.
The Rebels played both teams for the first time this season, losing to the Dynamiters 3-2 and to the Ghostriders 4-3. This came after their loss to the Beaver Valley Nitehawks on Saturday, Sept. 23 and the Rebels are now 3-4-0 for the season.
“All in all, every one of our games, all seven games, we’ve been scored on first, so obviously catch-up hockey is losing hockey and we were clearly the better team this weekend, I think overall. Kimberley by a slighter margin, but Fernie we outplayed them quite a bit and at the end of the day it’s tough when you give the other team a handicap every game,” said Bill Rotheisler, coach and GM for the Rebels.
He says that the team’s energy level at the beginning of the game was addressed between Friday and Saturday night, but now the team needs to address the kinds of plays it’s making at the beginning of the game.
They have a short window to address the issue, since they will once again face the Ghostriders in Castlegar on Saturday at 7 p.m., after playing an away game against the Creston Valley Thunder Cats on Friday night.
But the coach doesn’t think it will require too much of an adjustment.
“We don’t need to do a whole lot different. If you look at the shot count, we doubled them in shots and it was clear we were doing most things right,” says Rotheisler.
“We’ll make a couple of minor roster changes that we think will make a big difference and then from there… We don’t want to reinvent the wheel; we did a lot of successful things against that game, so we want to keep outshooting, we want to keep outplaying them. We just need to make smarter plays in our own end and put more of an emphasis on trying to make that a game where we’re scoring first.”