Marlies Lose 60 Minute Brawl In Cleveland

The Marlies named Trevor Smith to be their captain before the start of the 2013/14 season. Tonight, the Marlies played game 56 of the season. It was Smith’s third with the team. I don’t think that things went exactly as planned when the original announcement was made; but there are worse problems than “whoops, our Captain turned out to be NHL good until the team had to do trade-deadline cap shuffling”. With that said, he can no longer say he’s undefeated with a C on his chest, as the Marlies dropped this one by a score of 3-2.

Fraser McLaren was also sent down this week, and it took him just one second to get into his first fight as a Marlie, dropping the gloves with Daniel Maggio. It was the first of many fights in this game, initially followed by David Broll going toe to toe with Guillaume Desbiens. While both teams were taking shots with their firsts, the Monsters were definitely taking more with their wrists, and Brad Malone opened the scoring with just one of Lake Erie’s 17 shots in the first.

Things started becoming progressively physical once again in the second period, until it all hit the fan at the 12 minute mark. Greg McKegg fought (well, strong roughing labeled as a fight) David van der Gulik, and Kevin Marshall dropped the gloves with Mitchell Heard. McKegg, van der Gulik, and Heard all received game misconducts for continuing to fight after being broken up. Lake Erie earned a powerplay out of the mess, and Malone turned that into his second of the night. A few more penalties were scattered over the next seven minutes, as tensions showed no signs of disappearing.

The third was much of the same, with pushing and shoving being frequent, misconducts being handed out like candy, and two fights; one between Tyler Biggs and Duncan Siemens, and the other between Kevin Marshall and Brett Clark. With seven minutes left, the Marlies were short five players, and with six left, Paul Carey put them behind three goals. The game was basically over at this point.

Or was it? With two and a half to go, and a powerplay to work with, Spencer Abbot fired home his thirteenth of the year to break the shutout. With Drew MacIntyre on the bench, Jerry D’Amigo picked up his seventeenth just a minute later. Suddenly, there was 1:26 left to tie the game, and the Marlies kept pressing in search for the marker. Though they had chances right up to the final buzzer, Toronto couldn’t find a way to send this game to overtime, skating away with a losing result.

Coming soon