The Tucson Roadrunners' rally fell short as the San Jose Barracuda pulled away to take two of three games this week at the Tucson Arena.
San Jose topped the Roadrunners 5-2 on Saturday night after beating Tucson on Wednesday also. Tucson won Friday's game.
“Not what we wanted, we knew this was a big week,” said Roadrunners coach Jay Varady. “We knew we needed to get points out of this and we didn’t get the points we needed, so it’s frustrating to some extent, we would have liked to have been better, now we gotta get back to the chalkboard and get to work next week.”
San Jose forward Sasha Chmelevski opened the scoring 6:18 into the game. The Barracuda scored first in all three games in the series.
Then at 14:45 in the first San Jose forward and former Roadrunner Lane Pederson scored. Pederson played in four seasons for the Roadrunners and scored in all three games against Tucson (18-29-4-1) this week.
Roadrunners defenseman Cole Hults scored on a 5-on-3 power play goal 10:17 in the second, assisted by forwards Jan Jenik and Michael Carcone. But about six minutes later San Jose (20-29-2-2) scored its third goal.
“We fought our way back a couple times, got within striking distance and took too many penalties,” Varady said.
Tucson forward Travis Barron scored their second goal at 6:45 in the third, assisted by defenseman Matt Foley.
“It was just a one shot, didn’t really see it come in and luckily it went off my stick and found the back of the net,” Barron said.
The Barracuda responded with a power-play goal by forward Joachim Blichfeld with 11:22 left. San Jose scored a fourth, by former Roadrunner Nick Merkley, with 6:35 left and then added a fifth to pull away.
Both Tucson and San Jose were 1 for 5 on the power play before a crowd of 4,191. The Roadrunners outshot the Barracuda 34-33.
“You can never count us out, we can always come back and unfortunately it got a little too far out of reach for us today,” Barron said.
Varady said this series they got a boost from the return of forward Michael Carcone from the NHL on Friday.
“On the back end (defenseman) Cam Crotty did a really good job penalty killing for us,” Varady said. “Our numbers didn’t show up the way we wanted to in terms of our penalty kill, we lost a couple games, but I thought our guys killed some key penalties in some key moments, worked extremely hard, they were paying the price blocking some shots in those situations.”
Up next for the Roadrunners is a road game at the San Diego Gulls on Wednesday night. San Diego is in seventh in the Pacific Division’s final playoff spot while Tucson is in ninth. The Roadrunners return home Apr. 1 to host the Rockford IceHogs.
Slap shots
- San Jose defenseman Montana Onyebuchi was suspended for Saturday’s game after he got his 10th fighting major on Friday night.
- In Wednesday’s game each team had at least 55 minutes of penalties and Tucson had a season-high five fighting major penalties. On Saturday night both teams had 10 penalty minutes.
