Overtime was once again the Achilles’ heel for the Nanaimo Clippers as their season ended with a 4-3 overtime loss in Game 5 of the B.C. Hockey League championship series.
Down 3-1 in the best-of-seven Rogers BCHL Cup final, the Clippers were at Centennial Regional Arena in Brooks, Alta. Friday, May 22 for the fifth game against the Brooks Bandits.
The Clippers were hot at the start, with forwards Patrick Fortune and Drew Roelofs scoring in the first period to give Nanaimo a 2-0 lead. The second period belonged to the Bandits with Jack Rosensteel and Liam Fitzpatrick both scoring to tie the game at 2-2.
Frantisek Albrecht scored for the Bandits in the third and Nanaimo countered when Samuel Boisvert scored late in the period to tie it 3-3.
Jack Good clinched the championship, their second title in as many seasons, for the Bandits with the winner at 5:10 into OT.
Bandits goalie Zach Zahara made 25 saves on 28 shots, while Eliot Séguin-Lescarbeau stopped 43 of 47 shots for the Clippers.
Zahara was awarded the Jeff Tambellini Trophy as the most valuable player of the playoffs.
The Clippers were close in the final four games of the series. Following a 3-1 Game 1 win in Brooks, the Clippers suffered three straight 2-1 OT losses, with Game 2 going to double OT and Games 3 and 4 to OT.
The Game 4 loss featured the officials disallowing a Nanaimo goal and despite the Clippers pressuring the Bandits, out-shooting them 15-6, in OT, Harry Ahlberg scored late in the first OT, giving Brooks the win. Mathis Dufour opened the scoring for Brooks in the first and Charles Béland tied it 1-1 for Nanaimo with a power play goal.
In the lead-up to Game 5, Clippers head coach Colin Birkas, said the team would stay the course.
“I got advice from my son before the game and he said, ‘don’t change a thing; you guys are playing great.’ I relayed that to the group. I’m super-proud of how hard they are working,” Birkas said in a BCHL social media video. “They’re right in the fight. Brooks has got the bounces the last couple of nights in OT. We can’t seem to buy a goal.”
In an interview after Game 3 in Nanaimo, Clippers assistant coach Henry Acres noted how close the series was.
“It’s a dog fight, it’s two really good teams that are evenly matched, so it comes down to one shot, every game, and who makes less mistakes, and the other team capitalizing,” he said.
Tanner Bruender led the Clippers in post-season scoring with 20 points. Béland had the most goals on the team, and in the league, with 14. Bruender, Hayden Fechner, Jack Rimmer and Miller Kay were tied with 11 assists each. Séguin-Lescarbeau finished the playoffs with a 13-3-5 record with a 0.926 save percentage and a 2.20 goals against average.