North Bay Battalion win OHL Eastern Conference title in first year in new home: ‘I hope we haven’t spoiled them too much’

Their season that began with players tiptoeing around construction work during training camp, coach Stan Butler working out of his car and three weeks on the road before the home opener. Hopefully that does a little justice to how everything fell into place for the North Bay Battalion, whose first season in their new home will carry into May with a berth in the Ontario Hockey League final.

Over the past four weeks, the Battalion has gone from having its back to the wall in the first round vs. the Niagara IceDogs to sweeping an Oshawa Generals outfit with more star power but less depth in the Eastern Conference final. Fittingly, one of the lunch-bucket brigade, trusted penalty killer Jamie Lewis, scored the series winner with 5:33 left to help North Bay shade Oshawa 3-2 to complete the four-game sweep in front of a raucous crowd of 4,235.

"I just think it's great for the city of North Bay, it's great for our organization," Battalion coach Stan Butler said in a post-game media conference televised by TV Cogeco Ontario. "To come to a new city in the first year, to have the people fall in love with the team the way they have, to have the players do their share the way they have and to win the Eastern Conference in our first year back... I hope we haven't spoiled them too much.

"It's just the commitment of the group," added Butler, whose team trailed for a grand total of six minutes 22 seconds in the series. "Everyone says we trap. We don't trap. We track the puck hard from behind. We overplay in our own end. We play a pro-style game. It's the commitment of the guys. We play a hard game. We're not stretching passes and things like that. As I told these guys, this group will be defined by how they do in the playoffs. We talked in the first round, when some people thought we were not going to make it past that round [after going down 3-1 to the IceDogs], that you need some adversity. It was hard out there. They're a really good team. I never thought — I thought we could win — but I never thought we could win the way it happened."

The die is already cast for the OHL final, regardless of which offensively stacked club emerges from the Erie-Guelph series. North Bay is sliding into the role of being the quote, unquote no-name bunch that is bigger than the sum of its parts. It didn't have a top-40 scorer in the regular season and has only five players who are drafted and/or signed by NHL teams. Yet it kept the Generals' potent Scott Laughton-Michael Dal Colle tandem in check in this series, and also limited the damage from Barrie's 49-goal man Andreas Athanasiou in a six-game second-rounder. Laughton, it should be noted, hit the crossbar in the final minute on Wednesday, which was in keeping with how the last two games went for the Generals.

"It's going to be a David vs. Goliath battle, we see you media people write that all the time," Butler said. "We're just going to go in there and do our best for the city of North Bay."

Limber 18-year-old goalie Jake Smith has a 2.01 average and .919 save percentage throughout the playoffs. North Bay's blueline corps, led by the likes of Tampa Bay Lightning second-rounder Dylan Blujus and two undrafted 19-year-olds, opportunistic Brendan Miller and beefy Marcus McIvor, play the kind of game that has more currency in the playoffs.

"Down low they got some big guys that hold and mug you a little bit," Oshawa coach D.J. Smith said. "We didn't bear down on our chances. Last two games, watching the video, I thought we got more chances. They kept finding ways to get timely goals and we dried up a bit."

While San Jose Sharks signing Barclay Goodrow had five goals in the series, eight Battalion tallied at least once. Appropriately, for narrative purposes, Wednesday's scorers, McIvor, Alex Henriksson and Lewis, were all previously goal-less in the round. Having 15 players back from last season also came to the fore.

"We just played Battalion hockey," Goodrow said. "I think our depth really prevailed."

'We were on the ropes'

Losing the first two games of a series at home is almost always a deal-breaker in major junior, unless a team can deploy Jonathan Drouin for 30 minutes a night. Oshawa's fade in the first two games and North Bay's strong start validated the theory that early adversity in the playoffs is more relevant than having ample rest. Oshawa gave up all 13 goals while going 8-for-8 against Mississauga and injury-depleted Peterborough. North Bay lost consecutive games in each of its first two series.

"The first series we were on the ropes and we found a way off of it," said Butler, who also guided the Battalion to the OHL final in 2009. "The second series we were tied after four games and we found a way and this series here we seemed to create our own puck luck. I'm really proud of these boys."

The somewhat surprising run — North Bay was seventh overall in the regular season, but rated a 49 per cent chance to beat Oshawa — has a bittersweet tinge for the fanbase left behind on Brampton. As Butler said on Tuesday, "I always said we had the 500 best fans in the OHL in Brampton, but our arena held 5,000." Conversely in North Bay, which lost some of its hockey identity when the Centennials pulled up stakes for Saginaw, Mich., in 2002, fans can be referred to as a 'seventh man' without a whit of irony.

"It's easy to play in front of people who are behind you every step of the way," said Lewis, whose goal was only his second in the last three months. "I just thought we played 60 minutes as hard as we could and everyone played their roles.

"The biggest goal I ever scored in my life and I'm so happy I get to keep playing with my friends," the Richmond Hill, Ont., native added.

The win marked the first time since 1994 that the city has had an OHL post-season championship to celebrate. It would almost be easy to momentarily lose sight of the fact there is still another best-of-7 series left. Butler, whose team's surge began after his mother, Kay, died at age 81 in late January after a long battle with lung disease, maintained perspective.

"You reflect at the end of something," Butler said. "The biggest reflection I have today is just my mother, who died this year. She would have been proud of the game tonight, of the boys. So that's my reflection right now. As for the hockey season, it's business as usual."

Even after the most unusual way the year started.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet.