MOUNT CLEMENS, Mich. – Both the Metro Jets and MJDP teams won their respective Game 1s Friday night in their USPHL best-of-three series.
The Jets defeated the Pittsburgh Vengeance 5-2 at Mount Clemens Ice Arena and the MJDP downed the Fort Wayne Spacemen 2-1 on the road from the SportONE/Parkview Icehouse.
Cristian Adragna scored a pair of goals and Chad Noetzel scored once with an assist in the Jets’ win.
Will Augustine stopped 24 shots in goal while Owen Limback and Kam Hellman each posted two assists to go along with single goals from Devon Mastay and Alex Bedenko.
“Game 1 is done and we did what we needed to do, which was win,” said Jets coach-GM Justin Quenneville. “Some areas of our game we executed well, and others we need to clean up. We addressed it and will be ready for tomorrow.”
In Fort Wayne, Steven Miller’s goal at 6:20 of the third period stood as the game winner in a 2-1 win for the MJDP.
Ethan Smith scored in the second period and Freddy Soderberg finished with 37 saves for the win between the pipes.
“We played a good solid road playoff game – it was ‘hard’ hockey,” Jets associate coach Jamie Lovell said. “We had complete buy in tonight from everyone. I thought the goalies for both teams were the story tonight. Fort Wayne’s (Mikhail Melnikov) made some big saves for them in the first two periods and Freddy, of course, came up big for us in the third when they pushed hard to get back in the game.
“I expect the same type of game tomorrow night.”
The Jets and Pittsburgh drop the puck at 3:30 p.m. and the MJDP and Fort Wayne face off at 5:30 p.m.
All USPHL games are on HockeyTV.com.
