By WJBC Staff
BLOOMINGTON — Offense was hard to come by on Saturday night, but Bloomington Thunder goaltender Gabe Mollot-Hill made sure his team didn’t much.
Mollot-Hill stopped a career-high 32 shots and Mitchell Chaffee’s second-period goal held up as the game-winner as the Thunder battled for a 2-0 win and series split with the Green Bay Gamblers at the U.S. Cellular Coliseum.
The closest the Gamblers got to beating Mollot-Hill was in the middle of the first period with a pair of shots in a two-minute span that both rang the posts. But from there, Mollot-Hill settled in as his work load increased over the final two periods. The second-place Gamblers fired 24 shots in the final two periods alone, but Mollot-Hill was up to the task to earn his second career shutout.
The only offense the Thunder needed came in the first five minutes of the second period, as Chaffee netted his second of the year. Green Bay turned the puck over in front of its own net and Chaffee made the Gamblers pay. Chaffee pounced on the puck in the slot and promptly fired it past goaltender David Hrenak’s glove side to give the Thunder the lead they wouldn’t relinquish.
Just four minutes and 10 seconds later, the Thunder added an insurance goal on the power play via captain Tarek Baker . Vlad Dzhioshvili drove to the net along the right goal line, and Baker jammed home Dzhioshvili’s initial attempt to pad the lead to two.
The Thunder held the league’s best power play to just two opportunities in the game and only three during the two-game series. Bloomington killed off all three of those opportunities and took 10 total minutes in penalties during the weekend.
The Thunder continue a four-game home stretch next weekend with a pair of tilts against the Sioux City Musketeers.
