In only their second season, the Boston Blazers have become quite a heated, and maybe hated, rival to the Philadelphia Wings. This was never more evident Saturday night at the Wachovia Center where the Wings defeated the Blazers 13-7 in a fight filled game in front of a season high crowd of 11,241.
"I thought we carried over the way we played against Minnesota," Wings Coach Dave Huntley said. "I think we're playing pretty good right now."
The first quarter was a seesaw affair with Boston opening the scoring courtesy of Dan Dawson. Bill McGlone tied the score and the teams would then trade scores with the Blazers leading 3-2 after the opening 15. The end of the quarter gave a brief glimpse of how the night would finish out when Geoff Snider again tried to get at Boston's Mitch Belisle, Snider still upset over hits from Belisle in last season's meetings. The teams continued trading goals in the second and Boston held a 5-4 advantage at halftime.
For the second time this season against Boston, and second game in a row, the second half completely belonged to the Wings. Philly would outscore the Blazers 4-1 in the third and took an 8-6 lead into the final stanza. The fight card would also begin here when the Wings' McGlone and Boston's Kyle Ross went at it, each getting fighting majors and game misconducts from referee Mark Gardonio. The Wings would blow the game open in the fourth outscoring Boston 5-1 and chasing Blazers goalie Anthony Cosmo. The game would also continue to get chippy and with the outcome no longer in doubt the gloves would be dropped with the Wings Jordan Levine standing up to Boston's Jon Harnett. Three seconds after the Levine scrap, Snider finally got into it with the Blazers Paul Dawson, getting many good shots in against a bigger opponent. While this was going on, Dan Dawson would square off with the Wings' Taylor Wray and Wings captain Thomas Hajek and Boston's Jack Reid would go toe to toe. These bouts, and a huge win, would send the Wing faithful home very happy.
"I think they got a little frustrated," Levine said. "Some frustrations boiled over in the end, we didn't back down. We wanted to keep our cool, once we had the game in hand then we let our emotions out."
Drew Westervelt led the Wings with seven points on three goals and four assists while Brandon Miller had another strong second half holding the Blazers to a pair of scores while making 36 saves on the night. With the win the Wings improve to 4-8 and because of the logjam of teams in the East at 6-6, the Wings find themselves still in contention for a postseason berth. Tonight's victory gives the Wings the tiebreaker against Boston and earns them some revenge after they were swept the the Blazers in 2009.
Wray would sum up the Wings recent play and this game in general quite nicely.
"We're playing hard, we're playing together," Wray said. "We've been able to put together some good performances for a full 60 minutes. When you can do that you have an opportunity to win games. It was a good old fashioned lacrosse game tonight, it was nice to be on the winning side of it."
