Christian Del Bianco waited two and a half years after being drafted to get his first NLL goaltending win. There was not a happier player in the Calgary Roughnecks' dressing room when it finally happened.
“It definitely took me long enough,” Del Bianco said after making 47 saves in a 16-8 road win over the Toronto Rock.
Del Bianco had just turned 18 when the Calgary Roughnecks drafted him 15th overall in 2015. He was No. 3 on the Calgary goaltending depth chart in 2016 behind Mike Poulin and Frankie Scigliano. When Poulin signed with Georgia for the 2017 season, Del Bianco moved up to No. 2. He rarely got a start, but his outstanding performance in relief of Scigliano in a 13-12 overtime loss to Saskatchewan on Jan. 27 earned him the start in Toronto.
“I was getting a little impatient,” the 5-foot-10 goalie from Coquitlam, British Columbia, admitted after showering Saturday night. “[My dad] said, ‘You’ve got to win one.’”
“‘I know that, trust me,’” Del Bianco told his father. “It’s nice to get the monkey off my back.”
Del Bianco's first NLL win was “a stepping stone” for himself, he said, as well as for the Roughnecks, who hope the win against a team that had been scoring 20 goals a game in four consecutive victories leads to greater things in the second half of their season.
Calgary, 2-5, won for the first time since Dec. 15, though head coach Curt Malawsky doesn't think his team has been hiding.
“We don’t look through the rear view mirror,” Malawsky replied. “I don’t think our team has been hiding anywhere. We’ve been in some tight games and didn’t quite grab a win here or there. We don’t look at it from a record standpoint. We’ve just got to play the next one. [If] you start looking back at what you didn’t do, you’re just going to sewer yourself down the drain. We look forward the whole time.
“We played really good lacrosse in the last game. It’s a tight league. I don’t think we changed a lot over the last three weeks. We just got good results [Saturday]. We got rewarded for our execution. We outshot Saskatchewan and didn’t get the win. From a coach’s perspective, you try to just continue the process. These guys believe in the process and, more than anything, they believe in themselves. That was evident [Saturday].”
Toronto was up 7-5 early in the third quarter when Adam Jones was assessed a major penalty for spearing for pushing his stick at Mike Carnegie after taking a shot. The Roughnecks scored two power-play goals on Nick Rose to tie it, allowed Tom Schreiber’s only goal of the night, then scored the last nine goals. They outscored the Rock 7-0 in the fourth quarter.
“Mike had a good matchup with Jones, just getting under his skin and making him take a stupid penalty like that,” said ‘Necks defenseman Tyson Bell. “It was huge for us.”
How good was Del Bianco?
“He’s a quick, athletic kid and he came in and showed it,” said defenseman Chad Cummings. “He made crucial saves with guys in tight.”
“He had a really great game,” said Bell. “From warmups, I could see it in him. He was really prepared and he carried it all the way through.”
Toronto outshot Calgary 55-52, yet, Calgary won by eight goals.
“We got Rosie and their defense movin’,” said Curtis Dickson, who scored a game-high four goals. “The way Christian and our defense played gave us a ton of confidence. We didn’t feel as if we needed to score every time down the floor. That’s huge for us. The ball just seemed to be dropping for us.”
Dane Dobbie and Riley Loewen scored three goals each.
Did Del Bianco make any recent changes in technique?
“I had a couple of guys point out a few flaws to me,” he said. “As a young goalie, you try to watch as much film as you can and adjust your game, especially to the team you’re playing.”
Captain Dan MacRae credited Del Bianco and “a great game plan” from “some of the best coaches in the league” for the win.
“We were really riding the momentum from the second half of our last game when we came back from a six- or seven-goal deficit when Christian stepped in,” he said. “We really started to feel as if our defense was starting to gel. It’s about building camaraderie and getting a good feel about playing with each other. We feel as if we’re turning a bit of a corner here.”
The defense came in intent on limiting right-side shooters Tom Schreiber and Rob Hellyer and lefty Jones, who entered the game as leading league scorers.
“The coaches put some matchups on those guys and the guys who had those jobs put forth fantastic individual efforts,” said MacRae. “We had some good teamwork. [The Rock] like to go one-on-one out of the corners. They’ve got some great athletes who can go to the net with the ball. So it was a team defensive effort. It started with Christian, obviously. I can’t say enough good things about his play in the nets.”
“[Calgary] matched up really well athletically with them with Tyson Bell, Zach Currier, Danny MacRae and Creighton Reid all with fast feet and able to keep up with their left side,” said assistant coach Rob Williams. “We did a good job over there and we did a good job with our stay-at-home D guys like (Curtis Manning) Manno, and with Carnegie sticking with Jones. We did a good job of spreading out their offense.”
“Jonesey is always a great competitor,” said Carnegie. “We go way back to the Colorado days. We’ve had some really good tilts in the West, and in Saskatchewan when he was there. He’s an unbelievable outside shooter. You can’t give him a lot of time and space. You try to get in his hands a lot, try to make a difficult night for him. We had a good night on defense and, obviously, Christian Del Bianco had a great game. You can’t say enough good things about the kid. He’s in the right position all the time.”
As the Roughnecks headed home, everything was good.
“We’re starting to put things together,” said Bell. “We had a tough first half to the season against a lot of strong teams. Right now, we’re in a good spot with this big win against Toronto.
“We’re all brothers. Like our coach says, 'Family.' That’s what we thrive on. That’s where everything starts from.”
Calgary players have a postgame practice of presenting an award to their player of the game. It’s a flashy suit, but it was mistakenly left behind in Calgary. Del Bianco was their player of the game. With the suit unavailable, he was given a game ball.
We asked him about the Roughnecks’ chances going forward.
“There’s not a team in the league that doesn’t have a chance,” he said. “We believe in our team and that’s all that matters moving forward.”
“We’re just getting started,” said Bell.
“We’re trending upwards,” said Cummings. “There’s nothing but positivity in our room right now. We’re just trying to get better each time we step on the floor.”
“This is kind of how we’ve been expecting ourselves to play,” said Dickson. “We showed our true colors. We’ve got to play a full 60 minutes to be competitive in this league.”
“We’re starting to come together,” said Dobbie, who scored two highlight-reel, over-the-shoulder goals. “We’ve played three good games in a row. We got a good outcome in this one, which gives us confidence. Now we’ve got to take care of home floor in a divisional game next weekend.”
He doesn’t have a preference on who starts in goal.
“Frankie and Christian are good buddies,” he said. “I watched Del play through junior. He’s a solid goalie. Same with Frankie. We’ve got confidence in them both. Del Bianco stood on his head and won us that game [Saturday].”
Del Bianco wears No. 35 on his back.
“It was the number I was assigned my first year of pee-wee. Every since then, I’ve always taken it.”
And he’ll gladly take his first NLL win.