Komets general manager David Franke still believes he will have a coach in place by June 1, though he declined to get into specifics about potential candidates – with one exception.The goal this week, everyone agreed, was simply to take care of business. How else to approach three games against the caboose portion of the IHL?
“Right now, our job is to win,” said Komets forward Matt Syroczynski after the Komets indeed won Saturday, 6-5, over the Flint Generals. “If it’s ugly, it’s pretty, we just need wins, and that’s what we’ve been doin’.”
Suffice it to say business is booming – or at least it was for, oh, about three minutes and 19 seconds late in the second period.
The Komets scored four times in that span to turn a 3-2 deficit into a 6-3 lead, and wound up needing every last one of them in front of a sellout crowd of 10,480 in Memorial Coliseum.
It was their fourth straight win and their third this week against the IHL’s bottom three teams, Quad City, Dayton and Flint (19-29-6), and it drew them into a tie for second with idle Port Huron and to within 10 points of frontrunning Muskegon, which lost at home to Bloomington.
It was also the rare instance in which the Komets (33-16-3) found themselves in a scorefest and got the better of it.
“It was a lot of goals, back and forth, but you can’t take it too high or too low in these games,” Syroczynski said. “We really didn’t like our game too much in the first period. As the game went on, I thought we got stronger.”
Syroczynski scored twice in 18 seconds in the second period. Justin Chwedoruk, who came in struggling with seven goals in 41 games, broke out with two first-period goals, one of them shorthanded. And Konstantin Shafranov and Kaleigh Schrock scored as the Komets outshot Flint 39-29 and chased Flint goalie Sergei Zvyagin, 39, in the midst of their four-goal blitz in the second.
That happened after the second of Syroczynski’s goals, a wrister from just beyond the left circle at the 15:15 mark. It gave the Komets the lead for good at 4-3 after they’d squandered earlier leads of 1-0 and 2-1.
“Yeah, I think some panic set in on our team,” Komets coach Al Sims said. “Muskegon’s losing, Port Huron’s not playing, and here we are with another opportunity maybe to get to second place … I think guys just said, ‘Geez, we got to get this done. We’ve got to find a way.’ ”
They did.
“Yeah, unfortunately we let them get back in it, and fortunately we were able to pull it off,” Chwedoruk said. “But a win’s a win, and we’re glad to have it. Now we’ll just move on to next week.”
