Sheffield Steelers scored a couple of goals in the back half of the 3rd period to spoil an outstanding Eamon McAdam performance as the road team disappointed Spectrum’s crowd with a 3-1 win over the Flames.
The clubs traded goals in the opening set with Matt Alvaro’s powerplay marker staking Flames to a shortlived lead at 8:26, ahead of Josh Nicholls’ equalizer just over 2 minutes later.
Steelers had the bulk of the play in the 2nd, peppering McAdam with 16 shots against just 6 at Matt Greefield, but McAdam was perfect across the set to hold Flames in a 1-1 tie through 40 minutes.
More than half of the 3rd ticked down before the scoring changed and it was the Steelers on a powerplay who got the breakthrough with a Robert Dowd goal a little more than 8 minutes from time and he added another at 57:16 to secure the outcome.
McAdam turned aside 36 of 39 shots while Greenfield made 26 saves on 27 tries.
“That was definitely not the way we were looking to bounce back from last night’s game,” said Paul Dixon.
“Sheffield had far too much possession and territorial play across the evening for us to give ourselves a reasonable chance for success.”
“Eamon had an outstanding performance to hold us in there, but we simply did not generate nearly enough offensive zone time and pressure to realistically come out of the night with a win.”
“Winning or losing tonight doesn’t change the things we are aware need to be worked on, so we are not going to haul this around too long. We will take a break tomorrow and get back to training Tuesday for a run of home games that we really want to use to our advantage in the early part of the schedule.”
