Chiefs capitalize, drive past T-Birds

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

And it took a big dose of luck for the Spokane Chiefs to make 5,936 fans happy with a 4-2 win over the Seattle Thunderbirds at the Arena on Friday night.

Calvin Pickard, Seattle’s fine young goalie, mishandled the puck behind his net and Steve Kuhn pounced on it to feed Dominik Uher for the winner with 3:33 to play.

“End of the game, tight game like that, both teams going hard, you never know. Mistakes are made,” Kuhn said after Uher, a 17-year-old rookie from Czech Republic, scored his first Western Hockey League goal.

“It was just good to see how happy Dom was when he scored. … It feels good for the team. I was playing with Dom all game, mainly. He worked really hard and he really deserved that goal.”

Uher was playing in just his 11th game of the season.

“He was excited – good for him,” coach Hardy Sauter said. “He has worked extremely hard in the weight room and in practice and I’m glad that getting an opportunity he was able to not only get a goal but get the game winner.”

It was the opposite for Pickard.

“I do feel bad for him,” Sauter said. “He played real solid all night and it’s too bad a fumbled puck has to lead to the game-winning goal. At the same time, we generated a lot of good chances early and we probably did deserve to score four.”

It took an empty-net goal by Kyle Beach, his second goal of the game and 21st of the season, at 19:46 to make four.

Before that, it was a a struggle.

It took the Chiefs (17-8-2, 36 points, third in the U.S. Division) more than five minutes to get their first shot of the game, but the Thunderbirds (10-17-4, 24 points) only had their first shot after more than four minutes. The Chiefs then had a flurry of shots, highlighted by Jared Spurgeon’s first goal at 9:33.

Kenton Miller, battling in the right corner, popped the puck out to Mitch Wahl behind the net and he found Spurgeon charging in from the right point, where he easily beat Pickard with a high shot.

Spurgeon, who missed the first 18 games of the season, was glad to finally score, although with two more assists he has 12 in his nine games.

“I had a couple of chances the last couple of games,” he said. “It’s a relief to get one in.”

The T-Birds cashed in on their first power play when Lindsay Nielsen redirected a shot by Jeremy Schappert from the right point past James Reid for his sixth goal at 16:52.

After a scoreless second period, Beach scored a power-play goal just 47 seconds into the third period, taking a feed from Stefan Ulmer in front and whizzing the puck high past Pickard.

That lead lasted all of five minutes, when Reid left a rebound out front. Prab Rai, who has eight goals and eight assists in the past eight games, picked up the loose puck and whipped it around Reid.

The Chiefs had some issues getting the puck out of their own end at times, although they limited the Thunderbirds to 22 shots while getting 33 of their own.

“You have to give credit to them,” Spurgeon said. “They’re fast, they were on us right away so it took us a while to get adjusted to that. They were working hard. It was just a hard-fought battle. The ice wasn’t perfect tonight so the pucks were bouncing but we worked our way through it.”

Overall, Sauter was pleased, especially with third-leading scorer Levko Koper out with a lower-body injury.

“Our guys did a real good job forechecking (and) for the most part I thought our specialty teams were sharp and I thought our guys stayed relatively composed,” he said.

Chiefs 4, Thunderbirds 2

First Period—1, Spokane, Spurgeon 1 (Wahl, Miller) 9:33. 2, Seattle, Nielsen 6 (Schappert, Rai) 16:52.

Second Period—None.

Third Period—3, Spokane, Beach 20 (Ulmer, Spurgeon) :47 (pp). 4, Seattle, Rai 17 (Nielsen) 5:51. 5, Spokane, Uher 1 (Kuhn) 16:27. 6, Spokane, Beach 21 (Johnson, Spurgeon) 19:46 (en).

Power-play Opp.—Seattle 1 of 3; Spokane 1 of 4. Saves—Seattle, Pickard 10-11-8—29. Spokane, Reid 6-7-7—20. A—5,936.