From the Rampage Desk: True North Pain

The beloved Rampage headed to Manitoba for a pair with the AHL’s best team and ended up losing both by a combined 10-3. The Moose are yarding the league at this point with the best record and are closing in on a goal differential that’s twice their games played.

MAN 7 – SAR 2

The only chance I thought the Rampage had in these games was to score early, and they did here while playing a fairly solid 1st period. The 2nd was a disaster as San Antonio took penalty after penalty and gave up 4 goals. Shots were 16-5 and 33-17 overall at that point. After that the 3rd was meaningless score effects.

Goals: Vogelhuber, Grimaldi
Shots: 35-40
PP 1/6, PK 3/5

MAN 3 – SAR 1

The usual penalty parade happened early and the Mooses lead 2-0 after the 1st. This time the Rampage came out rolling in the 2nd and had the edge in power plays (3-1), shots (20-5) and goals (1-0). A solid effort in the 3rd was foiled by a couple of late penalties by Alex Belzile and AJ Greer and the Moose got an ENG to finish the game off.

Goal: Butler
Shots: 37-31
PP 1/5, PK 4/6

Overall

Not that Manitoba needed the help but special teams had a really rotten week here. The PK gave up 4 goals on 11 chances while the power play managed only 2 in the same amount, plus they gave up a shortie. The Rampage now sit 19th in the league in both and have 19 more PKs than PPs.

Thanks to score effects San Antonio actually had the upper hand in shot share 72-71, let’s see how that translates to shooting percentage.

SA: 4.2%
MAN: 14.1%

Hmmm, ok. The Rampage usually shoot 9.7% and the Mooses shoot 12.7% and special teams opportunities were even. San Antonio was either not developing their regular amount of scoring chances or not taking advantage if they were. Given the wholesale changes in the lineup thanks to the Blues injury woes this isn’t really surprising. You would expect Manitoba to score around 9 or 10 goals with this kind of shot output so the defense wasn’t any worse than anyone else that’s tried to stop them this year.

Lineup

It was a busy week for transactions. Tage Thompson was called up to the Blues on Monday and Klim Kostin was formally assigned to Russia’s WJC team. Thomas Frazee was recalled from Norfolk and Michael Joly joined the team from the Eagles on Tuesday.

On the day of the 1st game, Nic Meloche, Joe Cannata and Brady Shaw were recalled from the Eagles in an odd move that has to do with some vague technicalities off the ice. Meloche gets to stay but the other 4 ECHLers were re-assigned on Saturday.

Chris Bigras crashed into the net in Thursday’s game and we wait for word after an MRI and visit to the team doctors on his status. It’s LBI and he was unable to put weight on one of his legs as he left the ice.

J-C Beaudin’s broken finger healed well enough that he was back in the lineup on Friday.

Reid Petryk is still out with UBI and Joe Colborne’s status is unchanged. Here’s the lineup from Friday’s game:

Besides the players that left after the game, the healthy scratch was Jesse Graham. Tyson Barrie broke his hand vs Arizona so the Avs are left with just 6 healthy defensemen at this point. Maybe they’ll call someone up, who knows. Right now the Rampage have 12 healthy forwards and 7 healthy D. NHL rosters are frozen until the 28th so we’ll see what happens.

Links

If you missed it last week, catch this interview our own JD Killian did with Rocco Grimaldi.

Also, our good friends at Running With the Herd dropped another Rampage podcast that you’ll want to hear

Next up

San Antonio has a home and home with Texas Weds/Fri then spends New Years Eve with the San Diego Gulls.

Thanks once again to the San Antonio Rampage for the cover photo and line graphic, and AHL.com for statistics