Sapurji: Wake up call for complacent Majors

After last night's 3-1 victory over the Brampton Battalion at the Hershey Centre, I had an interesting chat with Mississauga St. Michael's Majors forward Jordan Mayer, who scored twice in the win.

The Majors (40-17-4-2) had gone into a funk during the last week of February, with only one win in six games which left them sporting a 5-4-0-1 record in their last 10. It also dropped them out of the CHL Top 10 rankings, though they did get a thanks for trying honourable mention.

"I think it could have been a little fatigue coming in, or y'know maybe we just got a little lazy," said Mayer explaining the skid. "I think that's probably the biggest thing is getting those practices where we weren't going hard enough and we haven't been physical enough in our practices -- and that's our style of play, so we have to practice that way and we have to play that way."

Lazy? Fatigue? Lax practice?? Uhhhh, what?!?

Is this like Lost where there's a parallel timeline in which there's a softer, gentler, non-yelling Dave Cameron behind the bench?

Apparently not.

"Oh, he didn't like it," said Mayer, proving everything is right with the world. "We definitely had a hard week this week, but I think we deserved it and we came back and proved ourselves."

According to coach Cameron, it wasn't so much laziness with his team as it was complacency that had erroded the team's drive.

"We've been embedded in third place for a while now," he said of the Eastern Conference standings. "I think that once they realized that, some of them started thinking, 'Well now if I cheat, and we don't win, it's not really going to hurt the team.' So I think we had some bad habits creep into our game. But that said, I certainly don't want to take anything away from the team's that beat us -- we got beat fair and square.

"But I don't think lazy is the right word ... complacency, maybe loss of focus, we were concentrating more on individual play as opposed to team play."

And with only a handful of games remaining in the regular season, that is definitly not the mindset you want your team to have heading into the playoffs.

"That's something we've adressed and we're adressing it daily," said Cameron. "Bad habits don't seep into your game over night, they sneak in over a period of time -- but they don't leave over night either."

ROLL UP THE RIM TO LOSE? It's my favourite time of year with Tim Hortons' annual promotion underway. Not sure why I'm so excited, since I'm currently 0-for-5... a few more coffees and I'll likely be in Oshawa Generals territory.

QUESTION: Have any of you ever won a prize outside of the free coffee/donut/muffin? I'm curious, since I've never known anyone to win any of the good prizes... though a friend of mine told me he knew a guy in Sudbury who won a barbecue a few years ago. So all I've got is hearsay -- just wondering.

As always - questions, comments, compliments, complaints, threats etc: [email protected] or on Twitter @loosepucks