Midway point report

by **mc_homer** Tue Oct 15, 2013 8:56 pm

Last night the Beefs passed the midway point of the season so how have they done? Well the overall answer is a bit of a mixed bag.

The Beefs started off the season downright awful coming out of the gate to a 1-3-3 before finally stringing together a run of wins but stayed fairly average for a while including a 0-3-2 run. Recently however the Beefs have developed into one of the leagues better teams and currently sit at the top of the power rankings on a 9 game win streak.

Rather unsurprisingly the turn around seems to have coincided with the turn around in Tyler Seguins game. The newly acquired centre had struggled in the seasons early goings not scoring and eating all the minuses causing GM Homer to shuffle the lines constantly trying to find something that worked. In recent games Seguin has been a scoring machine dragging himself up to third on the team list now above a point per game. His +/- at -7, while still bad, is a vast improvement over where it was just 10 games ago.

Also worthy of much praise is the play of #1 defender Duncan Keith, rookie Stanley Cupp and starter Kent Simpson. Keith leads the league in scoring among defenders and has more points than any other Beef player. Stanley Cupp has 45 pts in his first 42 games and currently leads all rookies in scoring. Kent Simpson also leads the league in GAA and sits 3rd for save%.

How long will this run last for the Beefs? Only time will tell but what they have done is put their fate in their own hands as they now sit 4 points clear in a playoff spot. With half the season to go however there is a lot of hockey left to come.

The Baby Beefs continue to be among the cream of the crop sitting atop the Nandos Conference and 2nd only to the seemingly unbeatable Wales Whales in the overall standings.

Austin Watson and Alexander Khokhlachev are leading the way with 113 points between them while newly acquired Yutaka Fukufuji has been a rock in net posting a .914 sv% along with a 2.34 GAA.

With a 30-9-2 record it looks like the Baby Beefs are on course to make the playoffs as one of the top seeds again but as has been the case for the past few seasons, the question remains, will they bring home the Princes Trophy for the first time?