One can only hope that the Merritt Centennials had better luck on Wednesday night in game two of their best-of-seven series against the Penticton Vees than they did in the opener on Tuesday. (The result of Wednesday’s game was not available by press time.)

In game one of the BCHL Interior conference final, played in front of an announced crowd of 2,200 at the South Okanagan Events Centre in Penticton, the Vees outskated, outhustled and outscored the noticeably-nervous Cents in rolling to an easy 5-0 victory and a 1-0 lead in the series.

“We’ve got to be better than we were,” stated Cents’ head coach and GM Luke Pierce bluntly. “We struggled. We weren’t good.”

It was not a pretty sight for the 75 or more Centennials’ fans in attendance at the SOEC Tuesday as they watched their team get totally dismantled in the one-sided affair. The Vees outshot their opposition 34-20 (including 16-9 in a four-goal second period) and went 2-for-7 on the powerplay.

Penticton’s Chad Katunar picked up his second shutout in as many games, while Lino Chimienti and Tyler Steel shared the loss in the Cents’ net.

“You’re going to lay an egg once in awhile,” Pierce said. “I’d much rather it be in game one of the series than later on.”

While the Vees dominated play territorially in the opening 20 minutes, and doubled the Centennials in shots on goal, Merritt managed to go into the first intermission down just 1-0. On the powerplay, Mario Lucia, an NHL draft pick of the New York Rangers, went down the right side and completely undressed the Cents’ defense with a pretty outside-inside move before beating Chimienti cleanly.

“I thought our energy was pretty good in the first period,” Pierce said, “but we just couldn’t get pucks through. Unfortunately, our wind wasn’t there as the game went on.”

The turning point of game one was unquestionably the first six minutes of the second period. Less than two minutes in, the Cents found themselves with a two-man advantage for 1:16. A hesitant Merritt powerplay not only failed to score, but did not even get a shot on Penticton’s net.

“The five-on-three powerplay that we had absolutely killed us, ” conceded Pierce. We couldn’t even put two passes together.”

The Cents’ bench boss went on to add, “Maybe, in hindsight, I should have called a time out and settled our players a bit, but at the time, they [Penticton] were a bit frustrated and I didn’t want to give them a chance to regroup.”

Shortly thereafter, the Vees added insult to injury. With the Centennials on the penalty kill, Lucia scored his second of the night, tapping home a Troy Stecher centering pass.

The Vees would go on to score three more times in the middle stanza to effectively put the outcome of the game on ice. Bryce Gervais and Lucia, with his third, scored less than two minutes apart to chase Chimienti from the net. Steel, his replacement, barely had time to get warmed up before Curtis Loik finished off a nifty two-on-one rush with Wade Murphy to score Penticton’s fifth and final goal, and for all intents and purposes seal the outcome of the game.

Physical play – one of the keys to the Cen-tennials’ success in their round one sweep of the Prince George Spruce Kings – failed to materialize in Merritt’s first playoff encounter with the top-ranked Vees.

“A lot of it is timing,” explained Pierce. “You’re going from a team {Prince George] that isn’t overly mobile, and the targets are big, to a team {Penticton] that is much smaller and very shifty. They’re a different animal, and we need to adapt as a group and funnel them into areas where we want them to be.”

To the Centennials’ credit, they showed no quit in the third period. They prevented the Vees from doing any more damage on the scoreboard, while sending a clear message that game two on Wednesday was going to be a different story.

“Every one of their goals was a result of our mistakes,” declared Pierce. “They were all preventable. We take those [mistakes] out of our game, we manage the puck a bit better ourselves, and I think we still have a really good chance to split over there.”

The final 30 minutes of Tuesday’s game had their testy moments. Late in the second period, Brayden Low engaged the Vees’ Grant Nicholson in a brief scrap following a hard hit on the sideboards. At the 6:30 mark of the third, Regan Soquila got off lucky with just a two-minute boarding minor after skating a long way cross-ice to pitch a Vee into the same sideboards.

The scariest moment of the game, however, occurred in the final minutes of regulation time. Cents’ defenseman Dylan Chanter missed a check and fell awkwardly into the boards face-first. Fortunately, the 16-year-old blueliner suffered nothing more than a bloodied nose and was scheduled to play last night.

The only planned line-up change for game two was Steel starting in net instead of Chimienti.

“Lino was good in the first round,” Pierce said, “and there was nothing that you could fault him on on Tuesday night. That said, Tyler has played Penticton well. Sometimes you need a little shot in the arm.”

Games three and four are slated for Friday and Saturday night in Merritt, starting at 7:30 p.m.