Giants take revenge on Storm with shutout win

Photo: William Cherry

Belfast Giants avenged their midweek defeat in Manchester with a home, shutout win over the Storm  in front of 6,441 fans at the SSE Arena.

As they had done on Wednesday night in Manchester, the Giants raced into a two-goal lead against the Storm. Jeff Baum's nice wrist shot from an angle beat Evan Weninger with 7:46 played, while Travis Brown followed up on a rebound to double that lead at 10:19. The hosts survived 41 seconds with three skaters to come out of the period two ahead.

Period two saw Storm failed to take some excellent chances - both a 3-on-1 and a 2-on-1 went begging with Tyler Hinam shooting high on the former, and an Anderson pass too high on the latter. The Giants thought they'd made it 3-0 31:53 off a David Goodwin shot, but the goal was immediately washed out for Goalie Interference. Adam Keefe challenged the call, and the Giants were put down a man for two minutes after the review came back negative.

Loren Ulett nearly got a Storm coming rolling with a wonderful between-the-legs move but found Beskorowany tight to his post. The Giants goalie made a series of excellent saves in the final period to Storm a repeat of what happened on Wednesday night, where the Storm came back from two down to take a 5-2 win. As it turned out, Storm would failed to beat Beskorowany on any of their 32 shots and could only watch as Blake Speers added an empty-netter to settle things with 30 seconds left.