The Vancouver Giants still have yet to beat a surging Kamloops team this season, which started slow out of the gate, but since a trade to acquire Portland net-minder Dustin Butler plus a few other tweaks have steadily climbed the division ladder. They now sit 3 pts behind a Vancouver team which had an almost insurmountable lead earlier in the season, almost. Vancouver has now dropped 3 of 5 since the Christmas break and are looking very ordinary right now and not at all like Memorial Cup contenders. All three of Kamloops' goals came on special teams, with their PP unit notching two and their PK scoring a short-hander mid-second to put the Blazers up 2-0. The Blazers capped off their scoring for the evening with a third goal in the second which in the end they needed to get the win. The Giants managed to get a goal very late in the third giving them a bit of life, and then an odd one a little over a minute later to make the game interesting trickled past Butler, but in the end they failed to get even a point out of the game and remain 0 for 4 versus their divisional rival.

The Blazers opened the scoring in the first period on the PP. Ray Macias took a shot which bounced high off the rebound over Blaine Neufeld and Reid Jorgensen tucked it in the goal. The shots were low for this game as The Blazers managed only 5 shots in the first to the Giants 6.



The Blazers scored twice on their 4 shots in the second, the first one being a short-handed tally. Reid Jorgensen stripped the puck and carried it into the Giants zone. He put on the after-burners and cut around Jonathon Blum feeding Tyler Shattock at the goal crease. Shattock tapped it past Neufeld putting the Blazers up by 2. The Blazers went up by three late in the second when referee Kyle Rehman was his usual incompetent self -- gifting the Kamloops team with yet another PP opportunity after giving the Giants team the same gifts earlier in the period, which they failed to capitalize on. Reid Jorgensen scored his second of the night, garnering his third point of the game, by lifting a short-side PP tally high over Neufeld.

The Giants came back very late in the third on the PP, when Spencer Machacek got the puck to Milan Lucic who fired it over the net. Lance Bouma gathered the loose biscuit and put it in off a quick wrap-around. The Giants gained a bit of hope a little over a minute later when the puck took a weird bounce off of a Brett Festerling dump-in and trickled past Dustin Butler, to make the game interesting for the final five.

A truly pathetic night of hockey which saw the Giants go 1 for 9 on the PP, and the home town Blazers 2 for 11. The shots were a paltry 21-15 in favour of the Vancouver squad. And it appeared that officiating, as it usually does when Rehman has the whistle between his lips, took centre stage and created a game with no flow and no passion. Lucic and Ryan Bender dropped the gloves in the second, with Bender getting the extra two for roughing. The Giants will welcome back Cody Franson and Kendall McArdle to the line-up for their tilt versus Red Deer, Sunday Jan 7th and not a minute too soon as this team needs a lift in a bad way. Puck drops at 4pm PST, at the Pacific Coliseum.

Three Stars 1 - Reid Jorgensen
2 - Ray Macias
3 - Dustin Butler