It became very clear very quickly that the seven-goal outing for the Wheat Kings against the Lethbridge Hurricanes was not a one-off. The Wheat Kings even found not one but two more players to lead the offensive charge with hat tricks.
Chase Surkan and Luke Mistelbacher had hat tricks, and Grayson Burzynski and Dylan Ronald scored once each as the Wheat Kings won 8-4. Filip Ruzicka made 39 saves for his third win of the season.
“You can see we have quite a bit of depth up front and some guys hockey IQ really shone through this weekend,” said Wheat Kings head coach and GM Marty Murray. “It was not only 15 goals on the weekend, there were a lot of pretty ones too.”
For the second game in a row, it was the Wheat Kings who opened the scoring. On their first power play of the game, Surkan sent the puck from the left circle over to Mistelbacher at the right, and he let go a low, hard drag shot that found the back of the net.
After the Wheat Kings killed off a full minute of 5-on-3, Mistelbacher struck again. Jaxon Jacobson made a perfect spinorama backhand pass to Mistelbacher in the slot. No sooner was it on his stick than he rifled it past Michael Hutchison.
The Warriors got back into the game off a play behind the Wheat Kings’ net. Steven Steranka sent the puck out front to a waiting Jan Trefny, who lifted home a backhander for his first WHL goal.
From there, however, the second period was all Wheat Kings. On their second power play of the game, Burzynski drove up the middle and gained the zone himself, leaving the puck for Jordan Gavin at the right circle. Gavin fired it back the other way to Surkan, who cut to the backhand for his first goal and third point of the game.
Burzynski kept on rolling offensively at even strength as he jumped up to join the attack with Prabh Bhathal breaking in. Bhathal danced past a checker, recovered the puck off a poke-check, and fed it into the slot for Burzynski, who sniped his first on home ice for the 4-1 lead.
Still the Wheat Kings were not done, and again their power play powered them ahead. Jacobson moved the puck along the top and, from the middle of the point he gave Surkan a perfect shot pass that the rookie tipped in.
The third period went back and forth at an incredible offensive pace. It was the Wheat Kings who led off the scoring parade, with Surkan tapping home a back-door feed from Gavin to complete his first career hat trick.
After the Warriors buried a tap-in goal of their own (the first WHL goal for Mathieu Lajoie), it was time for another Wheat King to complete his hat trick. Yet again, Jacobson and Mistelbacher showed off their remarkable chemistry as Mistelbacher took a feed from behind the net and snapped home his third of the game.
Again the Warriors fought back with a pair of power play goals. First, Connor Schmidt found the puck out of a scramble and snapped one through a maze of bodies to make it 7-3. Then, with Lajoie, driving the back post, he took a feed from Riley Thorpe and snuck it through the five-hole on Ruzicka.
It was the Wheat Kings’ power play that had the last laugh, however. Gavin sold the shot from the top of the left circle and fed it perfectly to Ronald for the one-timer to round out the scoring.
The win gives the Wheat Kings their first two-game winning streak of the season. They’ll try to make it three when they face the Regina Pats in Regina on Wednesday night at 8:00 Central Time.
