Rush drop home opener to Rochester 16-14

A late penalty in the fourth quarter from Saskatchewan Rush defenceman Bobby Kidd III proved to be costly as the Rush dropped their home opener 16-14 to the Rochester Knighthawks on Saturday night at SaskTel Centre.

After securing a lead with just over five minutes to play in the fourth quarter off a Ryan Keenan goal, the Knighthawks put the press on and eventually found an equalizing goal from Ryan Smith to make it 14-14 with 4:11 to play.

While the Knighthawks were celebrating the goal, a scrum took place in front of the Rush net which resulted in Kidd III hitting a Knighthawks player in the face. The player would go down and the officials would discuss the call for about 90 seconds before rewarding Rochester a power play.

On that power play, Kyle Waters scored to give the Knighthawks a 15-14 lead with with 2:30 remaining in the fourth quarter. The Rush tried to respond with their net empty, but it wasn’t meant to be as the Knighthawks scored a goal with 30 seconds remaining on the empty net to make it 16-14.

Rush head coach Jimmy Quinlan gave his thoughts on the late call by the official.

“I honestly didn’t see it. I kind of saw the aftermath and again I don’t know how hard he (Bobby Kidd III) contacted the player. I know after all goals there’s a lot of jawing between players, (but) regardless you can’t put the refs in that position,” Quinlan said. “My message to Bobby (after the game) was you need to own it and you need to move past it and you’ve got to assure your teammates that it’s not going to happen again and you just got to keep your word. I know he’ll respond well — he played unbelievable for 57 minutes — the timeliness of the penalty was tough, (but) again not one play wins or loses you a game — there’s way more mistakes we need to clean up.”

Quinlan said there were a lot of little things they could’ve done better to help get them their first win of the season.

“(We need to) ask the guys to take good shots in the fourth quarter and perhaps we really need to really define that to the players,” he explained. “We want to play fast, but at the same time we want to take good shots. If it’s not a good shot or a great shot, we’ve got to make our offence work their defence. And then again just fine tuning our defence. I thought our pressure was very good at times and then when we didn’t play the way we wanted to play we allowed too many open shots.”

While you don’t get any credit for losing a game in the NLL, Quinlan was happy to see the start his team had after last weeks tough loss in Halifax. He thought they looked a lot better this week at home.

“It was way better. I don’t think that was really us in Halifax, I think we were a little tentative and tonight we were way better. I didn’t like that they got onto a couple three-goal runs — we always want to stop those at two — there were a couple plays where we scored and then within 30 seconds they had scored again,” Quinlan said. “I told the players on the bench that we need to spend our energy on the floor. When you score a goal you’re kind of on a high — and all of a sudden you give one up — that’s a lot of energy you’re spending that you don’t want to be spending. Again, I think we were better out of the gate, we just got to find that game for 60 minutes.”

Quinlan added with a young team they still need to learn how to win and continue to play smart lacrosse.

On Saturday, Zack Manns led the team in scoring with a hat trick and three assists for six points. Robert Church also had five points with two goals and three assists in the loss.

On the Rochester side of things, Connor Fields had 11 points on the 16 Knighthawks goals.

Attendance at SaskTel Centre on Saturday was 8,708. The 0-2 Rush will travel to Las Vegas next week to play the Desert Dogs on Friday, Dec. 15.