EVERETT — According to a 1970s-era television series, eight is enough.
The Everett Silvertips defense has needed just half of that.
Everett’s injury-riddled blue line has forced the Tips to play most of their past three games with just four defensemen, but so far Everett’s decimated defensive corps has held up to the task.
“I feel like we’re doing pretty well,” defenseman Cole MacDonald said Wednesday before the team departed for Portland for Thursday’s Game 3 against the Winterhawks. “We only had four or five D for the last couple games, so we played all right. That loss was tough in the second game (a 4-3 double-overtime defeat last Saturday that knotted the best-of-seven playoff series at 1-1), so we have to get that back in Game 3.”
The Tips have watched as their defensive resources have dwindled. Everett lost two defensemen to injury in Game 6 of its first-round playoff series against Spokane. Noah Juulsen left during the first period of that game, while Tristen Pfeifer departed in the third. The Tips wound up needing three overtimes before winning 2-1 to end the series.
Pfeifer has been ruled out for the remainder of the season, while Juulsen hasn’t suited up since. Everett has enough defensemen to still ice the standard six. However, for long stretches of the past three contests the Tips have deployed just four: MacDonald, Ben Betker, Lucas Skrumeda and Kevin Davis. With two of those three games requiring multiple overtimes, those four have gone far beyond the normal call of duty when it comes to ice time.
“Those guys have logged a lot of minutes and handled it pretty darn well,” Everett coach Kevin Constantine said. “We kind of played with five-and-a-half D the last part of the season, and certainly in the Spokane series there were moments where we were down to only four D playing. Those guys have played a lot of hockey and done a very admirable job, especially Game 6 against Spokane and Game 1 against Portland.”
The additional minutes is a serious physical drain. If a team is playing six on defense, then in a 60-minute game the defensemen would average 20 minutes, with the top performers getting a little more. In Game 6 against Spokane, which lasted more than 103 minutes, the four defensemen who absorbed the majority of the minutes would have approached 50 minutes of ice time.
“It’s tiring of course, but you just have to battle through it,” MacDonald said. “We’ve been training all year for it, so we just have to step up on the right occasion.”
Said Skrumeda: “You just have to stay mentally engaged into the game, just take it one shift at a time because when the games go into those long overtimes the next shift could be your last one. You just have to drink lots of water on the bench and you just have to give everything you’ve got every shift because you never know what’s going to happen out there.”
However, both MacDonald and Constantine said there are actually benefits to tightening the defensive rotation, ones that could outweigh the fatigue factor.
“Sometimes you can get in a little better rhythm of playing when you just go on and go off,” Constantine said. “Sometimes when you know you’re going to go on and go off you keep your game a little simpler and you try a little less, and sometimes trying less is better in the game. It’s not that long ago teams played more four D than they did six D. It’s unusual in the past five or 10 years, but not that unusual in the history of the game.
“But that being done, it’s still not something we’d like to see because it didn’t work in the last game,” Constantine continued. “We’d like to think we took the game to overtime, and in the first overtime we probably had a couple more chances than them. But overall in the game it was asking too much of those guys. So as good a story as it is, it’s not the way we want to play. We don’t want to play with four guys, we want to play with six.”
Juulsen didn’t practice Thursday, meaning Betker, MacDonald, Skrumeda and Davis may be called upon to carry a heavy burden yet again in Thursday’s Game 3. With the series switching to Portland, the Winterhawks will have the last line change and decide who star forwards Oliver Bjorkstrand and Nicolas Petan line up against.
Everett’s managed to keep those two relatively contained through two games as they combined for just four points in the first two games. But they teamed up to score the game winner in the second overtime of Game 2, and the Tips defensemen know they still have their hands full.
“Those guys have a lot of talent, they’ve been doing it in the league for a couple years now,” Skrumeda said. “You can’t give them any time or space, you have to play them honest or they’ll make you look bad. I thought in Game 1 we did a good job on them, Petan had just the one point. In Game 2 they did a little bit more damage. It’s going to be more of a group effort in Portland without the last change, but I think we’ll be able to get the job done.”
Slap shots
Tips winger Dawson Leedahl, who missed the previous five games because of injury, took part in practice Wednesday and may be able to return for Thursday’s Game 3. … Everett announced Wednesday it has signed prospect forward Brian King to a WHL education contract. King, a 1999-born resident of Golden, Colorado, was a fourth-round pick in the 2014 bantam draft. This season he played for the Rocky Mountain Roughriders National 16U team, with whom he had nine goals and nine assists in 28 games. He did not attend Everett’s training camp last August because of injury, but did spend a week practicing with the Tips in February.
Check out Nick Patterson’s Silvertips blog at http://www.heraldnet.com/silvertipsblog, and follow him on Twitter at @NickHPatterson.
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