The Estevan Bruins played a solid 60 minutes and spoiled the Bombers perfect road trip with a 4 to 2 win on Saturday at Affinity Place,  to hand Flin Flon just their third regulation loss of the season.

 

The night started well with Justin Lies picking up his league leading 35th of the season on the powerplay less than 5 minutes into the the game.

 

Estevan made a goaltending change pulling Jackson Miller after the goal and just four shots in favour of Cam Hrdlicka and the move paid off.

 

Goals the rest of the night were tough to come by and Flin Flon could only muster one more as Hrdlicka ended up stopping 27 out of 28 to help his team pick up the win.

 

Liam Bridger found the back of the net late in the third to make it 3 to 2, but couldn't get the equalizer and Papaspyropoulis seeled it with an empty netter to give the Bruins the 4 to 2 win.

 

Zac Burns, Blake Heward and Ilia Chemelevski scored the other Estevan goals as the Bruins got back to .500 at 20-20-1-2 and now sit 7th overall tied wth Melville.

 

Harmon Laser Hume started the game and gave up 3 goals on 36 shots and played well and suffered just his third loss of the year.

 

Despite the loss, Flin Flon still had a great road trip and ended up going 3-1 with wins over Melville, Notre Dame and Weyburn. These Southern road trips arn't easy and a few players ended up with the flu by the end of the week.

 

The Bomber remain the number one team in the country at 38-3-2 and a league best road record at 17-2-1.

 

Flin Flon will get a stiff test this Wednesday as they will make their way to the Northern Lights Palace to face the Melfort Mustangs. Melfort has beat the Bombers twice this season and put on a defensive clinic the last time they squared  off in Melfort on January the 6th.

 

The Mustangs blanked the Bombers 3 to 0 and didn't allow many good opportunities around their net and frustrated many of the Bomber top offensive threats.  Flin Flon will then host the Battleford Stars in a pair of games this weekend at the Whitney Forum which should have everybody in Bomber nation buzzing as it is always great hockey when these two teams come together.

 

We will broadcast two of the three games this week on 102.9 CFAR and flinflononline.com including the game from Melfort Wednesday. The Great North GM Coach's Show stats at 7:10 and drop of the puck for Creighton Furniture is 7:30.