Golden Hawks drop to fifth as regular season ends

January 31, 2014 · 0 Comments

By Brian Lockhart
The Caledon Golden Hawks took a surprising loss to the Fergus Devils in their last scheduled game of the regular season Sunday, leaving the ice with a 4-1 loss.
The loss drops the Hawks to the number five spot in the Georgian Mid Ontario Junior C Hockey League standings.
Losing three of their last four games, the Hawks gave up fourth place when the Stayner Siskins had a solid late-season push and finished the campaign with an eight-game winning streak, including a final weekend win over the Schomberg Cougars.
The Stayner streak also managed to drop the Schomberg squad down a notch to fourth place when the win gave the Siskins a single point advantage and they moved into the number three spot in the league.
Caledon still has one game left to play — a make-up match against the Alliston Hornets that was postponed in December due to bad weather. It will be played Saturday at Caledon East, starting at 8:10 p.m.
Going down to the last few games of the season, the only thing that can change the current standings are the results of the final games for Alliston, Stayner and Schomberg.
The Hawks will finish in fifth place — they can’t move any higher with the one game left.
The Hornets will try to maintain their second-place standing, but the Siskins, with two games left, could take over second if they win both of their remaining games and the Hornets lose both of theirs.
The Cougars have one game left on the schedule, so with 53 points to Stayner’s 54, they can only move back into third if they win their final game and Stayner drops their two matches.
From there, the rest of the teams in the league have already been slotted into where they will end the season.
Fergus, Huntsville and Midland will have a playdown series to see which team will get a berth in the playoff quarter-final round.
As it stands now, the Golden Hawks will be meeting Schomberg in the first round, but that could still change, depending on the final outcome of a couple of key games this weekend.
The Golden Hawks have had a solid season and currently have a 21-18 record including two overtime losses and three shoot-out losses.
They started slipping in the late season, including a 10-3 loss to Penetang Friday (Jan. 24).
Caledon struck first Friday with an unassisted goal by Daniel Cafagna, but the side was down 5-1 at the end of the first period. They managed two more markers in the third, from Randy Chen (unassisted) and Steven Klomp (Mark Smythe and Nicholas McNutt).
The team was less than two minutes away from being shut out Sunday. Derek Czech connected, with help from Cafagna and Klomp.