On a night when Alexandre Giroux made history by tying sniper Brett Hull’s AHL record of scoring a goal in 14 consecutive games, it was the Hershey Bears recent history that made the headlines today as the team dropped their 3rd consecutive home game, falling to the Philadelphia Phantoms in a shootout, 4-3.
Things started out well for the Bears when Giroux scored his record-tying goal at 14:32 of the first period, giving the home team a 1-0 lead. After defenseman, Sami Lepisto, broke up a Phantoms offensive charge at the Hershey blue line, his partner, Sean Collins, retrieved the loose puck. Collins, without hesitation, quickly hauled the puck into the Philly zone before dishing off a soft pass to Giroux, who one-timed the puck behind goaltender, Scott Munroe.
“I anticipated the pass and once I stepped in, I had room to go,” said Collins, who picked up his first point of the season at Giant Center with the helper. “I just kept going with it, and I saw it was Giroux, and I like his chances of scoring over mine, so just passed it over.”
According to Collins, who had a 15 game stint earlier this season with the Washington Capitals, he would have made the same play in the same situation even without the NHL experience.
“I think that’s the biggest thing I’ve tried to change about my game this year from last year is to just be more aggressive and more assertive and read plays,” said Collins.
With the help of Keith Aucoin, who single-handedly thwarted two Phantoms attempts to clear the zone during the Bears’ power play, Giroux added a second goal less than three minutes later at 16:57 to give the Chocolate and White a 2-0 lead.
Despite his amazing recent success in finding the back of the net, Giroux revealed that he has not altered his game day routine to keep his streak intact.
“It’s always the same, nothing different,” Giroux said. “I want to play as hard as I can and with a guy like Aucoin on my line, he’s so good with the puck, you just try to get open and when I shoot it goes in right now and hopefully I’ll keep doing it.”
After being outscored 2-0 and outshot 17-5 in the first period, the Phantoms netted the only two goals of the second period when David Laliberte (PP) and Jared Ross scored within a 40 second span.
“I thought we had a great first period. I thought the second period we took some bad penalties at bad times and just a couple bad decisions by our defenseman jumping up,” said Hershey head coach, Bob Woods. “You got the game kinda under control. You don’t need to take chances, and I thought we did that a little bit, and it ended up letting them back in the game.”
Quintin Laing gave Hershey a 3-2 lead at 12:17after an outstanding individual effort. After being denied by defenseman, Micha