Five-year wait over: Rockets win home opener

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This time, they didn’t let it bother them.

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“It was kind of an unfortunate play, too,” assistant coach Brandon McMillan said. “We thought there might have been a penalty on the play, and they kind of get a squeaky one in. We just stuck with it. Our guys really stuck with it tonight, and we didn’t let that affect us at all.”

The Rockets kept coming, and Barrett eventually tied the game.

For Barrett, it was a big moment after a difficult first season in Kelowna. He was part of a deep Memorial Cup roster last year, but opportunities were limited.

McMillan has seen a different player this season.

“I’m super proud of him,” McMillan said. “He dealt with a lot last year, not being able to play. He’s stuck with it. He works extremely hard. He’s always constantly learning and asking questions, and it’s starting to pay off for him.”

“He’s become a guy we can lean on a little bit this year. That’s what happens in junior hockey from year to year. He came in as a 17-year-old last year on a Memorial Cup team. Obviously, there weren’t a lot of opportunities there. There was a lot of depth up front, and he stuck with it.”

Barrett came into this season determined to make his opportunity count.

“He’s got a lot of motivation,” McMillan said. “He wants to do well, and you can just see it in his eyes that he’s ready and he wants to take another step.”

The Rockets were also generating plenty of offence before Barrett finally beat Penticton goaltender Evan Fradette.

Kelowna fired 20 shots on goal in the opening period, and Barrett’s goal came on the Rockets’ 29th shot of the night.

“We were funneling a lot of pucks, trying to get people and bodies there,” McMillan said. “We know he’s a good goalie, so that was one of our keys tonight, trying to get a few more shots than last night.”

The Rockets had just 22 shots in Friday’s 4-2 loss to the Vees.

“Shot volume was one of our keys, and I think we did a good job to start the game. Obviously, we would have liked to have something after that, but we just kept with it and were able to claw away later on.”

Henderson then put Kelowna in front on the power play.

After going 0-for-4 with the man advantage in Friday’s loss, the Rockets needed a response from their special teams.

“Something that we are really taking focus to this year is both sides of special teams, power play and penalty kill,” McMillan said. “We want to make sure we’re at the top of the league in both of those, and that’s going to give you an opportunity to win every night.”

“If you’re a hard team to play against on the penalty kill, don’t give up a lot of goals, and you’re able to contribute with your power play, that’s a good recipe for having success in this league.”

Henderson’s goal came from a power-play unit that wasn’t exactly planned.

“It wasn’t really a unit we had practiced with,” McMillan said. “It was because Henderson came out of the box, and that’s just kind of how it works sometimes.”

“You draw all these plays and you want to do all these things, and sometimes you just get five guys on the ice that just want to go score and make plays. It works out, and that’s what happened tonight.”

The goal gave Kelowna a 2-1 lead, but that’s where things could have gone differently.

The Rockets had already held 2-1 leads twice this season, only to watch the opposition get back into the game.

Saturday night, they built on it.

Kelowna made some adjustments in the neutral zone and began making the simple plays needed to protect the lead.

“I think that took a shift or two for a few of the new guys to kind of figure that out,” McMillan said. “Some of our guys last year played a different system we were doing in the neutral zone, and they were able to pick up on it right away.”

McMillan liked what happened after that.

“The willingness to stop on pucks,” he said. “We didn’t fly the zone. On turnovers, we were stopping, making sure the puck was out. We made a lot of just simple plays to get it out of harm’s way.”

The Rockets kept the Vees from generating much in the final minutes.

“They weren’t able to really generate too much offensively in the last 10 minutes just because we were trying to hold it, keep it, get it out and just play that game.”

Gerwing eventually finished it off with an empty-net goal.

For the Rockets, it was a home-opening win that had been a long time coming, an end to their five-game slide against Penticton and, perhaps most importantly, a night where they found a way to protect a one-goal lead.

The Rockets had scored just four goals in their first two games. After Saturday’s win, McMillan was asked if games decided by the narrowest of margins could become part of the team’s identity.

“You know, we’re going to have great goaltending every night. We know that,” McMillan said. “We just got Corbey [Nate Corbet] back, so we’re going to have a pretty solid d-core, and it’s going to be hard to get into our zone.”

“If we can play that type of way, 2-1 hockey, and really bog teams down, make it hard for them to get anything, and then we can be opportunistic and score our goals, get our power-play goals, I think we’ll be OK, and we’ll have a lot of good opportunities to win every night.”