North tops JHS

With their team intact, the Blue Jays skated right with Fargo North Tuesday night.

Unfortunately, Jamestown was short-handed for a chunk of time and lost a key player to injury as well in a 7-2 non-region loss in their final regular-season game of the season at Wilson Arena.

Scoreless for more almost 11 minutes, the Spartans scored three times in less than four minutes, while the Blue Jays lost a top defenseman for fighting (Jordan Slusser) and another due to injury (Kyle Walden/shoulder), leaving the home team without two of his best players.

“Saturday in Hazen we really stressed two things. Make good decisions and work your tails off,” coach Matt Stockert said. “For the most part, I thought we did that tonight. Obviously, there were a couple of big mistakes in there tonight and that was a big difference in the game.

“But when you look at it, early in the game and even the second period, when it was 5-on-5, I thought we did some positive things.”

Tylor Noll, James Simonson and Jake McPhail scored less than four minutes apart late in the first period to turn a scoreless game into a 3-0 North lead after 17 minutes.

“That was kind of a 4-for-nothing there for us. It’s scoreless, all of the sudden they get goal. We get the penalty, lose Jordan (Slusser) and then it snowballed a little bit on us,” Stockert said.

The Blue Jays cut it to 3-1 on Erick Paiement’s 15th goal of the season — assisted by Ross Pritchert — just 80 seconds into the second period. The Spartans answered, however, getting the first of Nick Brenneman’s two goals to push it back up to 4-1 at the 2:36 mark. They added a back-breaker from Kyle Berg with just 20 seconds left in the second to make it 5-1.

“We had to throw some different kids out there and for the most part I thought they did a pretty good job,” said Stockert.

Paiement finished off the scoring with a pretty unassisted goal in the third period, beating North goalie John Hanson.

The Blue Jays remain tied with Hazen-Beulah and Dickinson with six points each in the West. Two of three teams will have to meet in a play-in game. The Blue Jays have just two region games left, Friday at Mandan and Tuesday at Bismarck, and they’ll face the Braves short-handed.

“I’m not sure what we’re going to do,” Stockert said. “We got a couple of days to try and figure something out. So, we’ll see.”

Fargo North 7, Jamestown 2

Fargo North 3 2 2 — 7

Jamestown 0 1 1 — 2

Scoring summary

First period

1, North, Tylor Noll (Kyle Berg, Jake McPhail), 10:44; 2, North, James Simonson (Patrick McClellan, Sam Johnson), 13:20 (PP); 3, North, McPhail (Berg, Nick Brenneman), 14:16.

Second period

4, JHS, Erick Paiement (Ross Pritchert), 1:20; 5, North, Brenneman (Matt Trana), 2:36; 6, North, Berg (McPhail), 16:40.

Third period

7, North, Noll (Berg, McPhail), 5:47; 8, North, Brenneman (Berg), 6:33 (SH); 9, JHS, Erick Paiement (unassisted), 10:28.

Goaltender saves: Fargo North, John Hanson 2-7-7 16 saves. Jamestown, Tyler Lindberg 10-14-13 37 saves.

Penalties: Fargo North 10 for 20 minutes. Jamestown 7 for 25 minutes.

Records: Fargo North 6-9-2; Jamestown 3-13-2.

Sun sports writer Dave Selvig can be reached at (701) 952-8460 or by e-mail at daves@jamestownsun.com

Tags: sports, bluejays, jays, hockey, fargo, jhs