After the final horn had sounded and the game concluded against the Wings, the scoreboard told the final tale of the contest. The Philadelphia Wings emerged victorious with a 17-13 victory over the Buffalo Bandits last night before a crowd of 13,564 at the First Niagara Center.
What occurred last night for me seemed to bring up feelings of déjà vu, especially from those late games in the 2013 season against the Minnesota Swarm, where they lost 21-7 on the road at the Xcel Energy Center and against the Edmonton Rush, where they lost a 14-7 home game at the First Niagara Center.
In both of those games the opposing team was able to get the advantage over the Bandits through a couple of important factors.
The opposing defense was able to keep the Bandits to the outside and forced them to make very difficult low quality shots. This rendered the Bandits offense powerless. The Bandits were held to only 13 goals on 52 shots (25 percent shooting).
The Bandits defense was unable to keep a high-powered and physical offense to the outside, which enabled opposing players to slip through untouched for high quality goals. “Our defense was not making people pay the price and we were not boxing out,” Cordingley said. “Our defense was just as bad [as our offense]. We spent an extensive amount of time talking about not being outworked. And we were totally outworked tonight.” The Wings tallied 17 goals on 68 shots (25 percent shooting as well).
Penalty issues helped the opposing teams to get some special teams extra chances. Wings forward Jordan Hall scored on a penalty shot because the Bandits accrued too many penalties in too short of a time span.
All of those factors combined to create more and more pressure to fall upon the goaltender (whether it was Cosmo or Wagar) to keep calm and confident in the eye of the hurricane. Too much pressure on any goaltender will allow a chance for more and more mistakes and more and more goals to get through.
Buffalo Bandits head coach Troy Cordingley after the game said, “We were taught a lesson. We were outworked; we were outplayed; we were out-everything. We had guys on different pages. You have to be on the same page to win in this league. Quite frankly, we were terrible tonight.”
Cordingley and the rest of the Bandits coaching staff have the bye week to give the roster a thorough reassessment and make sure that the mistakes that occurred against the Wings will not happen again against the Rock on January 10th.
“We’ve got lots of work to do,” he said. “We need to get guys on the same page, because if not, there’s going to be a few guys watching from the crowd.”
