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Failure to execute

For the second consecutive night, the Red Deer Rebels outshot the Medicine Hat Tigers by a wide margin.
Rebels vs Tigers 1 101002jer
Red Deer Rebel Josh Cowen

Tigers 4 Rebels 1

For the second consecutive night, the Red Deer Rebels outshot the Medicine Hat Tigers by a wide margin.

For the second consecutive night, the Rebels came out on the short end of the count, falling 4-1 to the Tigers Saturday at the Centrium 24 hours after losing 2-1 at Medicine Hat.

Tigers netminder Deven Dubyk earned first-star status for a second straight game, stopping 36 shots including what could have been a harmful handful early in the contest.

Still, there was more to the story than Dubyk.

“He was part of it early,” said Rebels head coach/VP of hockey operations Jesse Wallin. “We came out hard in the first 10 minutes and forechecked hard and drew some penalties because of that.

“We created some opportunities early and had a lot of shots but couldn’t get one by him, but we allowed that to frustrate us and rather than digging in and staying with it, we just seemed to kind of sag and get down and seemed to lose some energy.

“We got sloppy and gave up a couple of goals off of breakdowns.”

Wallin was referring to Emerson Etem’s power play marker at 11:56 of the opening period and a second-rebound marker by Vahe Zakaryan just under six minutes later.

The Rebels finally cashed in when Matt Dumba’s power-play point shot hit the back boards and deflected off Dubyk’s skate and into the net at 8:48 of the second period.

The Rebels were one-for-eight on the penalty kill, while the Tigers were one-for-six.

“They pressured hard on their penalty kill and we knew they would,” said Wallin.

“Overall their penalty kill outworked our power play in a lot of areas. We tried to force plays and do too much and we got beat to the puck too often.”

While Dubyk was the man of the hour, Rebels netminder Darcy Kuemper couldn’t be blamed for the setback despite facing a mere 23 shots.

Kuemper stopped Tigers snipers Etem and Linden Vey on clear-cut breakaways in the first and second periods and couldn’t be blamed for Vey’s clincher at 17:04 of the final frame and was on the bench when Sam Dezman scored into an empty net a minute later.

“We gave up some quality chances so the shots on goal were somewhat deceptive,” said Wallin. “They had some two-on-ones and even a two-on-oh. Our goaltender made some good saves as well.”

gmeachem@www.reddeeradvocate.com