A courageous end to an improved season for the North Bay Battalion. They bowed out of the opening round playoff series vs Kingston in 5 games losing game 5 in triple overtime. Christian Propp kept the Troops in it till the very end making 71 saves on the night against the high flying Frontenacs.

“Just being in the moment at taking it 1 shot at a time. It was fun out there as the stakes were quite high,” Propp says.
Justin Brazeau had 4 goals in the North Bay loss and it was the final OHL game for Riley Bruce, Jesse Saban and Jake Henderson.

Coach Stan Butler says he’s proud of his team as they didn’t give up despite trading Cam Dineen and Brett McKenzie during the year.

“We could have gone the other ways like some teams did. To our credit, the kids pushed hard. Some people believe they probably over achieved to get into the spot they did. That’s a credit to the players as they played hard and didn’t give up,” Butler says.

Bruce who was the 3rd player chosen by the North Battalion in the 2013 priority selection played his entire career in the gateway city.

He says it wasn’t the ending he wanted.

“Bittersweet. We wanted to go farther. My final game was pretty special,” he says.

The Battalion played game 5 without Brandon Coe and Luke Burghadt. And Butler says two forwards including Brad Chenier and Daniel Walker played but were nursing injuries.

” Walker played with a broken hand and had a cast on it and like Chenier I don’t know how they were able to hold their sticks. Playing a regulation game would have been hard enough but to play 2 as they did Saturday was even more difficult,” he says.

Filed under: christian-propp, north-bay-battalion, riley-bruce, stan-butler