Gare Joyce

Gare Joyce writes regularly on junior hockey for Sportsnet.ca. A veteran journalist, Joyce is the author of Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts, When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey's Cold War and Changed the Game and Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm. He also writes for ESPN The Magazine, espn.com and several Canadian magazines.

If you follow the stats, it should have been a Battalion blowout win instead of of a 5-1 drubbing.

BRAMPTON: The Mississauga St Michael's Majors won't have any lasting souvenirs from Sunday's 5-1 win over the Brampton Battalion.

The souvenirs the Majors do have they were icing before they went to bed.

Yes, the welts and bruises will fade with time. The players' memory of what worked for them in Game 3 of their Eastern Conference semi-final will last longer.

If you just looked at the game summary, you might get the wrong idea about the matinee that aired on Sportsnet. The summary shows that the second-seeded Battalion outshot the Majors 36 to 23 and thus you might think that the score was tilted one way and the game action the other. The shots total here though is a waste of otherwise useful bandwidth.

Yeah, J.P. Anderson was very good and at times great in turning aside 35 shots. But Brampton had many more scoring chances than the numbers suggest. That the Majors showed reckless disregard standing and even diving in front of the Brampton shooters was probably the difference in the game.

Fact is, even in their losses to Brampton in the first two games of this series the Majors had displayed a willingness and proclivity for blocking shots. Yesterday, though, the Battalion's best shots stuck to them like so many fridge magnets.

"We've been good at that all season long," St Mike's coach Dave Cameron said. "Blocking shots doesn't take a lot of talent."

Well, maybe. I've always figured that we really have too narrow a definition of talent or skill in the game. For instance, the ability to win battles for pucks along the boards doesn't seem like a skill-at least until you notice that some can do and some can't. It can't just be a matter a matter of will. Ditto blocking shots. Some can do. Some can't. It's not just a matter of taking one for the team.

Or in the case of Mike Pelech, more than a few over the course of the game for Mississauga.

The first three goals were big Sunday. Brett Flemming's opening goal six minutes in set the tone. Then there was the double whammy: Jordan Mayer's scoring with less than a minute to go in the first and Kale Kerbashian blasting a slapshot by Brampton's goaltender Thomas McCollum 15 seconds into the second. Three-zip, enough to suck the oxygen out of the arena.

Sandwich in there, though, when the game was still 1-0, the home team had over a minute and a half on a five-on-three powerplay. You'd have bet that the Battalion would have managed to pot one. In a battle of special teams, Brampton brings some serious skill to the table with the likes of Cody Hodgson, Matt Duchene, Evgeni Grachev, Anthony Peluso and Josh Day. Problem was, though, they had a hard time seeing the net.

It was a great sequence for the Majors' penalty killers, Pelech and defencemen Cameron Gaunce and the aforementioned Flemming. Once Pelech blocked a couple of shots, the Battalion hot-potatoed the puck around, trying to get a clean look at Anderson. Couldn't come up with one. Wheeling it around to the left wing, they'd find Flemming closing on them fast. Taking it around to the perimeter on the other side, they'd find Gaunce throwing the whole side of the ice into total eclipse.

It was a heart-and-soul stuff for the Majors. For the Battalion it registered as just-not-our-day stuff.

I guess there's a danger of putting too much value in one shift, because Pelech had many good ones. He did after all pick up a goal and two assists and go plus-three head-to-head against Cody Hodgson, regarded as the best all-around player in junior hockey these days. By comparison, Pelech isn't regarded as a surefire pro. Undrafted, now in his fourth season in the O, third with the Majors after a year in Kitchener, never a 20-goal scorer at this level, he might look to a scout like just a good junior player and nothing more. He was, however, the most effective skater on the ice yesterday.

Brother of Matt, a draft choice of the Calgary Flames, and son of Bo, in his day a nightmare of a baller, Mike Pelech was pretty banged up after the contest yesterday.

"I'm not really sure how many I blocked ... a couple on that [five-on-three] shift, I guess," he said.

I didn't press him on the idea of blocking shots as a talent or skill-fact is, he probably needed to get the weight of his bruised pins. But hockey sense has to factor in there-call it instinct or vision or anticipation, doesn't really matter. I'm inclined to believe that it isn't that brave to block a shot-but it is to get back up and block another ... and another. And that there's talent to sliding in front of a shot and not taking yourself out of the play. A mistimed attempt to block a shot could have turned that five-on-three into a five-on-two.

Brampton's attempt to put a stranglehold on the series was also turned aside and so the series stands at two games to one with Game 4 heading down the 403 to the Hershey Centre on Tuesday night. The Majors had to feel shorted by the 2-1 loss in Game 2 Friday night-a game they could have easily taken to overtime and with a roll of the puck maybe even won. "We got a couple of bounces, a couple of breaks, and the early goal and that was the difference," Cameron says.

That this series could go deep looks like a decent bet at this point. The Battalion manhandled the Majors during the regular season but, fact is, the game Brampton needed most, a late-season tilt with Brampton's hopes of the No. 1 seed on the line, Mississauga upset them 4-1.

It's more or less the mirror image of the other series in the east, with Niagara knocking off the Bulls in Belleville 2-0 Sunday to crawl back into the series down two games to one with a Tuesday date coming home. Again, the IceDogs have to feel that they have had the luck they deserved-two overtime losses in their first two games versus Belleville-but another win versus the top-seeded Bulls would make this a memorable death match.

Stuff that fell out of my notebook ... Had a conversation with Doug Gilmour the other day. It sounds like he'd like to be back with Kingston next season, even though a few jackals in the Toronto media suggested that he was a publicity Band-Aid solution for a foundering Frontenacs franchise, one-and-out. I'm convinced he's sincere in trying to make a coaching career for himself. Fact is, there was a heckuva a lot more to head-coaching an O team than assistant-coaching a team in the AHL. He was taking on a lot more work in making what might look to some like a downward jump. Gilmour was put in a tough spot there-coming into the league in mid-season, having to learn both the game in the O and his own players at the same time. He seemed upbeat about his talent and the Frontenacs chances of coming away with a difference-maker in the first round and maybe other with second-round picks. And he thinks that working with the players from the start of training camp will be a significant benefit. The O desperately needs a good team in Kingston and Larry Mavety desperately needs fortunes to change there ... Everybody knew that the Windsor Spitfires had the best team in the O this year and so did the Windsor Spitfires. Not talking about coach Bob Boughner and general manager Warren Rychel, but rather the players themselves. I can't imagine that it's easy to coach a bunch of teenagers who have not just a lot of talent but a keen understanding that they have a lot of talent. That's the only way to explain the Spitfires' struggles in their early games of their two playoff series this spring. Somehow Windsor managed to fall behind out-manned Owen Sound 3-zip in Game 2 in the opening round. And somehow the Spitfires managed to lose Game 1 of the conference semi to Plymouth outright. Those adverse moments have a way of waking up the Spitfires. Windsor poured it on the Attack for their impudence, pelting goaltender Scott Stajcer with 71 shots. And pity Plymouth netminder Matt Hackett in Game 2 Saturday night. He saw 51 shots through two periods before he got relief from Scott Wedgewood. Final count: 72 shots. The Spitfires slumped to just 50 shots in their lopsided win Sunday. The hard thing with Windsor might not taking a game from the Spitfires but dealing with them the next game. It does seem like a little adversity is their wake-up call. Which is fine in a best-of-seven with its margin for error but not for knockout formats like the Memorial Cup.