TORONTO, ON – Friday night marked a rebound effort for the TMU Bold as they played a complimentary brand of hockey where the chances were limited for the Lakehead Thunderwolves and when the opportunities presented themselves, the Bold took advantage of them.
The line of Kevin Gursoy-Danill Grigorev-Kyle Bollers was fantastic for the Bold all night long as evidenced with Gursoy’s first hat trick of the season. This line caused a lot of stress on the Thunderwolves.
That line combined for seven points as TMU skated their way to a 4-3 win.
The chemistry of that line was found off the ice as Bollers said, “I live with Kevin [Gursoy]. I’ve been with him for four years and he’s really one of my best friends on the team so it’s great playing with him.”
“With Danill being a young guy kind of helping him get into the league and he’s playing fantastic for us.” Bollers with high praise for the first year who has five goals this season.
Chris Playfair would find a streaking Connor Bowie who would add his fourth goal of the year with just 13 seconds remaining in the first period to give the TMU Bold a 2-0 cushion.
Joe Mack would be sprung on a breakaway but shot it over the glove side of Bold goalie Kai Edmonds. The Bold quickly counte-attacked, as Bollers would feed Kevin Gursoy in the slot who ripped it past Thunderwolves goalie Max Wright for his eighth of the season.
“I think we played better Saturday night down in Brock and it was one of our better games of the year, if not our best,” TMU Bold Head Coach Johnny Duco said with an honest evaluation of his teams performance. “I thought we had a great first period but I didn’t love our second period. I thought we got outplayed and I thought we made way too many mistakes in the third period.”
Gursoy, who only scored eight goals all of last season has now matched that mark in just 15 games. Clearly his game has taken that next step and is primed for a big second half.
“This year, he obviously had a slow start. I think he had four or five games without a point. So he’s kind of getting in his head,” Bollers said. “Now he’s finally starting to get his stride to kind of play in the way that he knows he can play.”
The chances have been limited for the Thunderwolves as they average just under 3.5 goals per game and it’ll be hard for opposing teams to score on the Bold as they have allowed the second fewest in the OUA West.
Oliver Pouliot burned by Joe Rupoli and turn him inside out to score a wicked backhand shot over the glove side of Edmonds to cut the Bold lead in half. Pouliot is having a great season thus far setting a career-high Friday night in goals with his fifth of the season.
The Bold didn’t dwell over Pouliot’s marker and picked their goalie up with a lightning fast response as Kevin Gursoy would score his second goal of the night and ninth of the year – he set a new career high in goals – as he put home the fanned shot by Danill Grigorev.
The two teams are known for roughing each other up so no one was surprised when both teams got coincidental minors for roughing, setting up some 4-on-4 action.
The Thunderwolves would take advantage of that as Josh Van Unen got behind Aaron Hyman and scored his sixth goal of the season making it a 3-2 game.
Gursoy would take matters into his hands wiring home his third of the game on a pass from Bollers during the Troy Williams roughing penalty. That would be Bollers third assist on Friday night.
Bollers and Gursoy mimicked the performance put on by Maple Leafs superstars Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner Thursday night.
“Yeah it feels really good. Me and [Kyle Bollers] actually went to the Leafs game last night. We saw [Mitch] Marner put on a pretty good performance. So we were joking around how we kind of wanted to do the same thing tonight and fortunately for us we had the legs and they were going in.” Gursoy happily commented about his game.
Out of the gates in the third period, the Thunderwolves needing two goals really pushed the pace of the game as the puck squirted free to Josh Van Unen who went down on a 2-on-1 with Dylan Massie and Van Unen got the puck over to Massie but he fanned on the shot.
Six minutes in the Bold would find themselves on the penalty kill due to an Evan Brand interference penalty and the Thunderwolves powerplay would get a few looks but the strong penalty killing efforts helped keep it a two goal lead.
With the goalie pulled, the Thunderwolves would add a third goal courtesy of Nick DeGrazia.
Pags’ Points
- Friday night saw players on both Lakehead and TMU set career highs in goals. Oliver Pouliot scored on his backhand to set a new career high and Kevin Gursoy had a hat trick.
- Kyle Bollers had three assists tonight – all on Gursoy’s goals. Clearly the two of them are generating great chemistry on the ice.
- Great rebound performance by the TMU Bold after surrendering six goals to the first place team in the OUA in the Brock Badgers.
- One line that won’t get talked about was the Chris Playfair-Connor Bowie-Elijah Roberts unit. The Bold were consistently able to roll that unit and then come back out with the line of Danill Grigorev-Kevin Gursoy-Kyle Bollers. Those two lines spent a lot of time in the offensive zone
- Lakehead had a late push. They were very close to catching TMU on their heels as the Bold had a defensive failure in the dying seconds that led to a 2-on-1 but the pass went just wide.