Man, that felt good. Where was this when we played them previously?
Two goals each for Houle and Poturalski (Poturalski also had an assist), two assists for Bordeleau and Bailey, one goal and one assist for Robins. Tristen Robins is really coming alive in the second half of the season. Donavan Houle is continuing to impress. He's been my surprise forward of the year.
That first shift was a disaster and after that we were just too much for them. First period we were dominant. Third period they gave us a couple scares, but never felt like we were in that much danger of losing.
Bystedt took a misconduct (a coincidental misconduct, of course) in the third for what seemed like minor roughhousing. That'll get him some extra PIMs.
I'm going to harp on the refereeing again because it was genuinely pretty bad. Not even talking about bias. Already mentioned their love of coincidentals. The spearing call was legit, right off the faceoff Perreault blatantly speared Vincent. During that five minute penalty the referee blew the whistle and was going to call Bakersfield for too many men until the linesman pointed out that they'd pulled their goalie. It was that kind of night.
Anthony Vincent is almost too good of a pest. Every team we play seems to want to hurt him. He's fine after getting speared, but you almost watch him during every shift to see if someone's going to attempt a cheapshot on him.
It's funny you can even see it from Bakersfield's own highlight package: They're just genuinely not a very likeable team.