2013 Memorial Cup: Halifax leaves Moose tracks across Knights’ backs in 9-2 beatdown; post-game questions

SASKATOON, Sask. — The real Halifax Mooseheads showed up and the better version of the London Knights stepped out, resulting in a game best told in GIF form.

Martin Frk scored a hat trick, Jonathan Drouin and Nathan MacKinnon notched three assists each and Halifax hammered London 9-2 in the first decisive outcome at the MasterCard Memorial Cup. The tournament is far from over, but it was a signature Mooseheads performance, as they earned a least a two-day break. Halifax will either play Friday's semifinal if Saskatoon wins on Wednesday or go directly to Sunday's final if the Portland Winterhawks prevail.

Halifax pumped in five first-period goals. It was up a touchdown by the midpoint.

"The third time's the charm in terms of starts, being active down low in the D zone and in the transition to offence," MacKinnon said. "We didn't play well in the first couple games. Even against Portland, we won, but they could have ended it in the first period. Tonight was a good example of how we play and how good a team we are. Whether we play in the semi on Friday or go straight to final, we'll be good to go."

The Knights aren't letting on whether Jake Patterson or Anthony Stolarz, who have each been pulled during their two losses, will start in goal for Thursday's tiebreaker. Nor can one

"It was embarrassing, really," said ight wing Seth Griffith, who broke the goose egg with a second-period goal. "We haven't got beaten like that in a long time, The sun comes up tomorrow, we got another game coming up here and we got to take advantage of it."

On with the post-game questions:

What was a main difference for Halifax between its loss to Saskatoon on Sunday and Tuesday's trouncing? The Mooseheads were impatient against the Blades. Whatever the reason, they were more composed and calmly picked apart the Knights, who have been lit up a few times this post-season by the Barrie Colts and Plymouth Whalers.

"When you play against [Knights defencemen Olli] Määttä and [Scott] Harrington, you want to spread the ice as much as possible and try to get them to move," MacKinnon said. "They play a man-to-man, you want to move the puck and beat them to the net. We did that. At the same time you don't want to force anything."

The Mooseheads opened the scoring 7:36 in when Stefan Fournier buried on the power play. It took all of 86 seconds before Darcy Ashley capped off some end-to-end passing by diving in to poke a rebound by Patterson. London just wilted.

"They're tired," Knights coach Dale Hunter said. "Playing back-to-back and they battled back that game to tie it up [before losing to Portland]. It took a lot of energy to do that. Tonight we didn't have that. The first couple minutes were alright. When they scored the power-play goal and then they came at us in rushes, we couldn't come back from it."

Surely fatigue from back-to-back games cannot explain away such a result, though? No, but cumulative fatigue from playing deep into May in successive springs and needing to come back from a 3-1 deficit in the OHL final. Back-to-back games can be onerous at the Memorial Cup. London also had six 3-in-3's during the season. It's still played a lot of hockey in the last 20 months.

"You can make excuses all the time but when it comes down to it, we didn't come to play tonight," Griffith said. "Maybe this will be good for us. We can learn from it and move on.

"We left Patty [Jake Patterson] out to dry on the first couple and it just got worse from there.

"We've battled through a lot worse this year, we know how to battle back," Griffith added. "We're still confident our goaltending. We just hung them out to dry. We just have to be confident in front of them."

Was it wrong for Dominique Ducharme to have his first power play on the ice with fewer than three minutes left in a blowout? It probably violated some unwritten rule when MacKinnon, Frk, Drouin and point men Konrad Abeltshauser and MacKenzie Weegar were put out for a 5-on-3 that began with 2:47 to play. They didn't score on it.

Hunter refused to take the bait when asked whether an unwritten rule was breached.

"I'd do the same thing if I was coaching," he said. "It's good practice time for them. It was 8- or 9-2. We took the penalties and we're responsible for the penalties. I don't coach their team and they can do whatever they want."

London, out of frustration, took six consecutive penalties in the third period. Ducharme did give power-play time to depth players such as fourth-liner Domenic Beauchemin and stay-at-home defencemen Brendan Duke before putting out his top players.

"There were many power plays when we didn't put them out," Ducharme said. "There was one point where we thought they were going pretty hard with the slash so we decided to put them back out."

Can this Mooseheads duplicate this performance one or two more times, if necessary? That is the million-dollar question. Halifax certainly showed it has a good shot at playing on Sunday. It's just a question of whether they can replicate what they did Tuesday or whether they pull back a bit after trampling the Knights.

"Next time we play I want to see the same urgency, energy, battle level and composure that we had tonight," Ducharme said.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet. Please address any questions, comments or concerns to btnblog@yahoo.ca.