This past weekend was a tough birthday weekend for Bowling Green junior forward Brett Pilkington, as he learned his grandmother had passed away prior to the team’s games against Alaska-Fairbanks. However, the Calgary, Alberta native put his emotions aside and put up five points in the Falcons’ 6-2, 6-1 sweep of the Nanooks.
Pilkington, the leading returning scorer for the Falcons this season (10 goals-11 assists a year ago), scored two goals and tallied an assist on Friday, before adding two more assists to his total on Saturday. It was a weekend where the Falcons outscored Fairbanks 12-3 and moved themselves into a fourth place tie in the Central Collegiate Hockey Association with Northern Michigan.
“He went through a bit of a rough time this past weekend, having his grandmother pass away with it being his birthday,” Rich Meloche said. “But yet, the guy knows that and goes out and puts up five points on the board. That’s pretty nuts and it shows you how awesome of a guy he is.”
“He (Pilkington) had a real strong weekend,” head coach Scott Paluch said. “This past weekend he was moved to left wing and I thought he responded very well to it. He produced on the weekend, but most importantly he had his feet moving and was a factor for the entire weekend.”
This season, Pilkington has three goals and 13 assists, which puts him one point behind Jonathan Matsumoto, who leads the team in scoring with 17 points. The 13 assists ranks first on the team as he has become the big go-to-guy for the BG power-play this season.
Power-plays have scored 30 goals already for BG, which ties for the total extra-man goals the team had all of last season and ranks 12th nationally at 21.1 percent, according to U.S. College Hockey Online.
Pilkington has scored all three of his goals on the power-play while adding seven of his 13 assists, as he has had a hand in 10 of the 30 power-play goals scored.
“Before I came to college, I was much more of an assist guy,” Pilkington said. “Now this year, I’m still getting chances to score goals, but they just aren’t finding the net and hopefully as the season goes on, I can start adding more goals than assists.”
“Our power-play is doing well, but you can’t be satisfied with it either,” he added. “You got to keep driving forward and scoring more goals with the game being called the way it is this year with power-plays and penalty-kills being big parts of the games.”
His line, which included Meloche and Bryan Dobek, accounted for five of the 12 goals on the weekend against Fairbanks. Meloche had two goals and Dobek added two assists as their line was dangerous all weekend.
It’s a line match with Pilkington that Meloche, now with eight goals and four assists, has credited for making him into the big contributor he has been.
“If I could pick one other guy in the country to play with, that’s who I’d pick,” he said. “It seems like you’re always getting the puck if there’s no one around you because he (Pilkington) can feed anyone. He’s pretty good with the puck and he’s a remarkable guy to watch. You get caught in awe sometimes because of the things he does.”
“Ever since I came in here, he’s noticeably been the best player that we’ve had,” Meloche added. “Right now he has only three goals, but there will come a night where he’ll score five. He just does whatever he has to do for the team.”
Coach Paluch knows how skilled of a player he has with Pilkington and said that his main gift is his offensive creativity. He hopes in the future that he’ll start taking more shots while using that creativity instead of looking to distribute the puck first, like he has in past situations.
“He’s always been a pass first kind of guy,” he said. “We’re really working with him to try and shoot the puck more. He’s got as good and deceptive a shot as we have on our team. We want to keep that creativity alive, but we also think he can score a lot of goals here if he shoots the puck.”
Prior to this past weekend, it had been since Nov. 13 in a game at Nebraska-Omaha until Pilkington scored a goal.
His offensive presence became more apparent in the 10 games that followed as he tallied eight assists, until this weekend where he broke out of his goal slump.
A slump — something he and his teammates hope won’t happen again as they move closer to the end of the season.
“The rest of the year, we have to keep moving up the standings board and try to clinch home ice in the playoffs,” he said. “It’s something that hasn’t here in awhile. We need to keep getting stronger as a team and hope the puck keeps rolling in our favor.”
“This week, we’ll have to be prepared to skate a little more than usual with Northern playing on Olympic-sized ice,” he said. “Hopefully, if we stick to our systems and hit anything that is skating wearing white or green, then we’ll come out on top.”
The team has this weekend off and will be back in action next weekend as they travel to Northern Michigan for a crucial CCHA series.
