Important Home-Stretch of Games Coming up for the Junior Blues

As the slow-starting, suddenly revamped Springfield Junior Blues look to build off their currently impressive stretch, starting this weekend when they host the Janesville Jets for two games, the team will have an opportunity to start picking up ground against North division opponents as they will be playing a lot of upcoming games inside the Nelson Center.

This weekend will match the first two games of a stretch over the next month that will have the good guys playing on home ice six times over the next eight games.

With Junior Blues currently sitting in seventh place in the North division, and owning an overall record of 4-8-2 on the season, three of the teams’ four lone victories have come at home. Before splitting last weekend’s two game series on the road against Topeka at one win each, Brett Skibba scored five goals in two games and the Junior Blues defeated first-place Port Huron twice inside the Nelson Center, which started the streak of three wins over the last four contests.

Next weekend, following this weekends games against the division-rival Jets, team captain Mike Fazio and his Junior Blues will hit the road for two games against Johnstown in the first weekend of November—following that up with four straight home games against both the Soo Eagles (November 9^th and 10^th) and Topeka Roadrunners (November 16^th and 17^th).

Unlike last season, this team needs to make winning games at home happen more often. Although they still finished two games above .500 inside the Nellie (15-13-2), winning the games early on mean just as much as they do near the end of the season. They got off to a slow start before flourishing towards the end of the season when they went on a roll before heading into the playoffs.

So far this season, after a small sample of eight games, the team is 3-4-1 and with no losses in regulation over the two games this weekend, would reach the .500 mark---which in itself alone, could be a huge momentum shifter as the season continues on for such a young hockey squad.

The 2012-2013 North American Hockey League regular season is still very young—which means nothing more than that there is still a lot of time and hockey left to play. As the past few seasons’ have proved to us, despite this being a newly owned, coached, and player-led team, the Junior Blues have normally always been a second-half of the season team that builds off of winning games inside the Nelson Center.

Well, with this weekend starting a very important and opportunistic stretch-run of hockey games, winning in front of the Springfield-faithful looks to be a very important key role in determining how well this season will go. As the all time, famous expression goes though, only time will tell. Let the games begin!