HERSHEY, PA — The Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins are one win away from advancing to the Atlantic Division Finals after defeating the Hershey Bears 4-3 in overtime on Tuesday night. But the victory was not without controversy.
As Hershey looked to close out the game with their 3-2 lead, Penguins head coach Kirk MacDonald aggressively pulled goaltender Sergei Murashov for an extra attacker with 3:03 remaining as Wilkes-Barre/Scranton took an offensive zone faceoff.
Penguins forward Gabe Klassen won a faceoff over Grant Cruikshank, sending the puck back to defenseman Harrison Brunicke. On the other side of the ice, though, as Tristan Broz and Ilya Protas got tied up, the Penguins forward slashed the Bears centerman’s stick out of his hands. As the puck made its way over to Ville Koivunen at the opposite point, Protas extended his arms out like, ‘How’s that not a penalty?’
Seconds later, Koivunen, essentially with no pressure from a stick-less Protas, dished the puck easily down to the goal line to Broz, who found Avery Hayes open for a one-timer from the top of the right circle. The puck then deflected off Bears defenseman Ryan Chesley and into the net.
Avery Hayes’ game-tying goal with 2:53 remaining
Rutger McGroarty would then go on to win the game 5:03 into overtime, deflecting a shot past Bears goaltender Clay Stevenson off the back bar and out.
Rutger McGroarty’s OTGWG
After the game, the Bears seemed in disbelief that the call was missed, but tried to accept it and move on.
“Two minutes left in the game, we’re up a goal,” Bears head coach Derek King said. “You know, we’ve done a pretty good job this year defending like that. It’s just, you know, a guy loses his stick, hits a shin pad, goes in, and then anything can happen in overtime. You never know.”
When I pressed King, who brought up the play several times, if he thought Broz should have been whistled for a minor penalty, the Bears’ bench boss believed so.
“I think it was a penalty myself,” King said. “But like I said, I’ve said it all year, [the officials] have a tough job to do, and that’s their calls. And again, it was off a shin pad. I mean, you can’t control that. That’s just a shot. I don’t even think he looked. He just threw it at the net, and good things happened.”
Cruikshank also believed it was a blown call.
“Yeah, I mean, his stick got knocked out,” Cruikshank said. “But I mean, it is what it is. We can’t go back on it now.”
He added, “I wanted to go try to push [the stick] to him. I maybe should have stayed a little further over to the left, more on Hayes. But it is what it is. And, you know, we had to try to get past it, move past it, and try to find a way to win the game. And unfortunately, it didn’t go our way.”
The deflating loss came after Hershey came back from a 2-0 deficit early in the first period, as Phil Kemp and Mikhail Ilyin scored in the game’s first 6:16. Hershey battled back and dominated the game afterward, getting three consecutive goals from Ivan Miroshnichenko, Bogdan Trineyev, and Brett Leason.
Ivan Miroshnichenko goal
Bogdan Trineyev goal
Brett Leason goal
Then, as the Bears looked to close things out late in the third period, disaster struck.
“We can’t feel sorry for ourselves,” King, who came up with the team’s moniker this season, “Too Dumb To Quit,” said. “This team’s never done anything easy this year, so we’re going to have to do it the hard way.”
Game 4 of the series is on Thursday night at Giant Center.
