INDOOR LACROSSE
Race tightens as Bandits lose to Titans
Canisius alum Vinc stops 50 for N. Y.
Start spreading the news. There’s officially a race for the top of the Eastern Division standings, and the New York Titans have joined the Buffalo Bandits in the middle of it.
The Bandits dropped an 11-9 decision to the Titans before 18,550 in HSBC Arena. Buffalo had a chance to take control of the division race with a win. Instead, it’s a dogfight, with the Bandits (8-4) only a game ahead of New York and Boston (both 7-5) with four games left. The Blazers lost to Rochester, 11-10, so Buffalo still has the lead by itself in the East.
“You look at this division, and last year there were four teams at 10-6. That speaks for itself,” Bandits forward Mike Accursi said. “When you have an opportunity to get an edge, you have to take advantage of it. We didn’t do that.”
The Bandits haven’t lost a game by more than two goals this season, leading to postmortems about what should have and could have happened in those games. This was another one of them. Buffalo coach Darris Kilgour started the discussion with the goaltending on both sides.
“They outgoaltended us,” Kilgour said. “I thought we outplayed them, outshot them. I thought Mikey [Thompson] let in some easy ones. I’m not too upset. I think if we had shot better, we’d have won the game.”
Buffalo finished with a 59-40 edge in shots, as former Canisius College standout Matt Vinc made 50 saves.
“It’s a tough pill to swallow when you outshoot a team like that. We should win that game,” Accursi said. “We came up against a hot goalie, but we’ve got a team with a lot of good scorers. We’ve got to find a way to get the ball into the net.”
Vinc set the tone for the Titans in the first period. Buffalo had 19 shots in the first period but scored on only two of them.
“Matt is a great goalie,” New York coach Ed Comeau said. “When we made some mistakes, he bailed us out. Living so close to Buffalo [St. Catharines, Ont.], it was a big game for him.”
Once Vinc established that the Titans weren’t going away early, his teammates scored four straight goals in the second period to take a 6-3 lead. From then on, the Bandits had to keep climbing uphill.
The Bandits kept trying to get back into the game — Mark Steenhuis had four goals—but the Titans kept responding with goals seemingly before the crowd stopped celebrating.
“We’d score and get the bench fired up. When they score right back it kind of works in their favor. It kind of deflates us. We have to try not to get down like that,” Buffalo defenseman Billy Dee Smith said.
“We gave them the chances to come back,” Kilgour said. “If we shoot well, we’re up by five and that little comeback goal doesn’t hurt us. But, when you battle to get even and then give up a goal five seconds later, that definitely hurts. You have a lot of excitement and then you bottom out.”
Still, the Bandits only trailed, 9-8, with 8:22 left when they let a huge chance get away. Buffalo earned a four-minute power play when New York’s Bill Greer picked up a pair of minor penalties. Instead of giving the Bandits a boost, the man-advantage unit had four minutes of futility followed by a killer goal by New York’s Matt Alrich — his first of the season, no less—with less than four minutes left.
“It [the Buffalo power play] was awful,” Accursi said. “We stood on the outside and tried to let it rip from the outside.”
If Buffalo needed one last reminder about how the game went, it came in the final three minutes. Steenhuis got the Bandits to within 10-9 with 2:48 left, and Casey Powell of the Titans scored his third of the night 22 seconds later. That took the fight out of the Bandits for the rest of the night.
Now the Bandits will put a share of the division lead at stake next week when they play in Boston.
“I don’t think it will be hard to get fired up for that,” Smith said.
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