IceCaps pull one out of the fire against Devils

It was a game that featured all the ingredients that when mixed together and baked up might normally produce the hard-to-swallow dish of a loss for St. John’s.
• The IceCaps gave up a goal on the game’s first shot 18 seconds in.
• They allowed a tying goal in the last second of the second period.
• It took them over 12 minutes before they got their first shot of the middle frame and even longer than that to get one in the third, all of which contributed to them being outshot 22-8 over the last 40 minutes of the contest.
• They were zero-for-four on a power play that has gone as cold as the weather.
• And with the metro area having been hit hard by a blizzard — one which had pushed back the game’s starting time by three-and-a-half hours — the IceCaps were hardly backed by a raucous crowd. The official attendance was 3,537, but the actual bodies in the stands probably added up to about half that.
Still, St. John’s heads  into a Sunday afternoon (4 p.m.) rematch with Albany — which is tied for top spot in the AHL’s North Division — with two points from a win that snapped a two-game losing streak.
Michael McCarron scored the game-winner off a goal-mouth scramble at 14:51 of the third, which was 74 seconds after the IceCaps got their first shot of the period.
Jeremy Gregoire and Chris Terry, the latter with a nice shorthanded effort, tallied in the second period for the home side, while captain Max Friberg got an empty-net deal-sealer with just over a minute remaining in the game.
Albany defenceman Vojtech Mozik had scored the goal in the game’s first shift, taking advantage of an IceCaps stumble and turnover, while Ryan Kujawinski had the marker late in the second.
St. John’s netminder Charlie Lindgren made 28 saves for St. John’s, while his opposite number — Ken Appleby — dealt with 19 and those long stretches of inactivity.
Saturday’s result moves St. John’s (20-16-5) to within three points of Albany (23-16-2) and the Syracuse Crunch (20-12-8), which lost 4-0 to the suddenly hot Utica Comets, who have won six straight, including a couple of mid-week games against the IceCaps at Mile One.

Notes
Terry, who also had an assist on McCarron’s game-winner, extended his AHL consecutive-game point streak to 10. Besides being the IceCaps’ clear-cut scoring leader with 29 points, he’s also taken over as the top goal-scorer, with 12 … Terry was the first star Saturday, with Lindgren taking second-star honours and Devils’ Brian Gibbons getting the nod as the third selection … The choice as hardest-working IceCap was defenceman Julien Brouilette … It was clear the Devils were a dissatisfied bunch at game’s end, not just in light of the result, but also after they were denied a late power play for what they felt should have been a penalty to Brouillete for crunching hit on Albany’s Joseph Blandisi just before Friberg’s empty-netter … St. John’s once hot power-play has cooled in January, going one-for-24 in eight games since the start of the new year … The good news is that the penalty killing has shown improvement. Albany was zero-for-two with the man advantage Saturday (and gave up Terry’s shorthanded goal as well), meaning St. John’s hasn’t permitted a power-play goal in three games. Before that, IceCaps opponents had scored 10 times on 22 opportunities.
 

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