The Williams Lake Stampeders are one loss away from playoff elimination.
The Stampeders, who finished second overall in the Central Interior Hockey League regular season, fell 6-3 on the road to the seventh-seeded Houston Luckies Saturday in game one of its first round, best-of-three playoff series.
Williams Lake played with the Luckies through the better part of two periods before a noticeably short bench began to take its toll.
Tied 3-3 at the midway point of the second period Luckies player Blair Dinelle potted the game winner on Williams Lake netminder Justin Foote.
The Luckies, also on the strength of a hat trick performance from Jon Marren, went on to light the lamp one more time and score an empty netter en route to the game one win.
Scoring for Williams Lake in the losing effort were Wilfred Robbins and Francis Johnson with two.
Williams Lake had just 11 players suit up for the game — an achilles heel that has plagued the team all season through injuries and work commitments. Two Williams Lake players were working plowing snow during Saturday’s downpour, while two others were stuck working at camp.
Despite that, Stampeders general manager Don Hanson said his club did have an opportunity to pull out a win, but thinks a few unlucky bounces didn’t go their way.
“It wasn’t that we had a short bench,” he said. “They got some breaks and we didn’t. Two of their goals bounced off somebody’s foot and into the net and in the third period we hit the cross bar five times.”
Hanson gave credit to Luckies netminder Nick West for a solid outing between the pipes.
“He made one unbelievable save,” Hanson said. “One of our guys took a shot from inside the blue line through a crowd and he went down on the ice, stuck his hand up in the air and it was in his mitt. The crowd went nuts.”
Now behind 1-0 in the series and facing elimination, Hanson said Williams Lake needs to buckle down on home ice next weekend.
Game two goes Saturday at 7:30 p.m. while game three, if necessary, goes Sunday at 1:30 p.m.
