JYP Jyvaskyla made sure they were on their way to the Round of 32 with a 4-0 home-ice win over the Gap Rapaces. Read more in Gamecentre.
The Gap Rapaces could have overtaken JYP Jyvaskyla and qualified for the Round of 32 with a four-goal win, but instead it was JYP who won by four, and they'll be going on.
As favourites in the game, JYP took care of business in the first period with two goals. Midway through the period on the power play, Joonas Naatinen teed up a huge slapper off the crossbar and in that Clement Fourquerel couldn't react to quickly enough. Then six minutes later, Ossi Louhivaara showed a great burst of speed to beat a defender to the outside, then cut into the middle and scored on the backhand.
Knowing that Gap doesn't have the offensive guns to come back from a huge deficit, JYP did a good job of protecting their lead the rest of the way, adding a goal in each of the last two periods along the way. Ansi Lofman scored on a great wrist shot in the 35th minute to make it 3-0, and Aurelien Bertrand entered the Gap net in the third period to replace Fourquerel, who was shaken up in a collision early in the second period but finished it out.
Bertrand stopped 11 of the 12 shots he faced in the third period, allowing only Mikko Talveta to score on a rebound. At the other end of the ice, Veini Vehvilainen played all 60 minutes and stopped all 16 shots he faced.
“Well, I don’t know about the game but I’m happy with our effort,” Gap coach Luciano Basile said afterwards. “We decided to be a little bit more aggressive on our forecheck than in the game in Linkoping on Thursday. I thought we had a little bit more presence in the offensive zone through our forecheck. 5-on-5, the game only ended 2-0.
“Unfortunately, it’s hard for us to play at this speed and that’s why we took penalties – it wasn’t the lack of discipline, it’s the difficulty of playing at this speed, and I would say JYP gained control of the game through their power plays. They scored two goals but they also pushed us back and gained momentum through their power play, but I’m very happy with our effort.”
JYP coach Marko Virtanen countered, “The start was a little difficult – maybe we were playing with a little too fast of a rhythm. Our players kind of rushed into making plays and we made mistakes and poor passes. But slowly we got back on track and especially the third period was a stellar performance from us and it looked like what it should look like.”
When asked to compare Finnish and French hockey, Basile answered, “It’s like the difference between basketball and hockey. Finland is one of the great hockey nations in the world with Russia, Canada, the US and Sweden. France is a developing country. It’s a country that has been progressing consistently. The national team has been in the A-pool for I think 10 years now, with all home-grown players for the first time. Finland is one of the established countries. France is still a country that needs to progress a lot before arriving to the higher level.”