Belfast Giants head coach Adam Keefe hailed his side's "great start" to the new season with back-to-back exhibition victories over Elite League title rivals the Cardiff Devils at the weekend, but believes more improvement is possible as they focus on another pre-season double-header against the Dundee Stars this weekend before facing into their Champions League games in early September.
After a 3-1 win in their opening game at Ice Arena Wales last Friday night, the Giants returned to the SSE Arena for Saturday's rematch and were even more dominant, easing to a 5-1 victory to make it two wins from two.
The Giants returned to their training camp this week to work on the lessons from those games and to turn their focus to the two games with Dundee Stars this Saturday and Sunday.
Although any performance at this stage of the season has to come accompanied with the asterisk of 'it's just pre-season', there was plenty on show for the Giants head coach to be happy with so early in the campaign as they look to back up last season's excellent double-winning campaign.
Both Peyton Jones and Jackson Whistle had strong performances in goal in the two games against Cardiff, the defence was watertight in only conceding two goals to an offensively dangerous team, while three of their new arrivals - forwards Colby McAuley, Chad Butcher and Steven Owre - were all on the scoresheet.
"Very happy with our performance over the weekend,” said head coach Keefe. “I thought (on Friday) we were good defensively but we struggled to create as much as I would have liked. It was a different story (on Saturday), I thought we were clicking quite well.
"We used the whole bench both nights and that's what you want to see as a group. That's a great start for us.”
It wasn't all perfect, as you would anticipate in their first two games with a large group of new faces still trying to settle into the Giants' style of play, with the powerplay a particular issue having run 0-for-7 in the two games.
“A lot of the mistakes over the past weekend are down to my fault and that training camp was so rushed. We only gave the guys a loose structure. Now we have some more time this week before the Dundee weekend, we can work on some more things and try to eliminate some of the grey areas that exist in players’ minds when they’re not sure what we’re doing in each situation," added Keefe.
“We’re adding a building block each day, each game, each practice, individually and a group. As this week starts to build, I think the guys are going to start to really look forward to those Champions League games.”
That includes making some big calls in the line-up. With chemistry so good in the 5-1 win on Saturday, Keefe may opt to keep the changes to a minimum moving forward, but he still has one more piece of the puzzle to add back in with forward Darik Angeli expected to be available for the Dundee games.
“I’m still trying to get a sense of what we have and where everyone fits in the line-up. I was very happy over the course of the two games, but there are things we can get better at,” claimed Keefe.
“I thought the chemistry (on Saturday) was better than it was (on Friday), certainly offensively. We’ve got Angeli coming into the line-up as well, so we have to see where he fits in and where everyone shuffles.
“It’s a tough decision for me but a very good problem to have when we have so many good players jostling for position."
