As part of my role as team statistician for the Sudbury Wolves, my job description includes the preparation of weekly media notes, featuring various tidbits of information regarding upcoming games.

While these notes have generally been confined to circulating among media types and club officials, it seemed likely that fans of the local OHL team might also have an interest in the odds and ends that I might come across on a weekly basis.

It’s been noted that at least part of the reason for a slow start to the 2025-2026 season for the Sudbury Wolves has been the heavy preponderance of road games early in the year. Of course, that only holds true if your record improves notably when the home encounters begin to outnumber the away games. That balancing begin to happen in earnest this week for the Wolves, who play a pair of contests at the Sudbury Arena as part of a three game home stand.

The local juniors will also start to see their lineup of opponents begin to swing more towards divisional and conference foes, kicking this weekend off with a Friday night match-up with the Barrie Colts – the team which just happens to sit ninth in the conference at the moment (9 points), the very first step up the ladder that the Wolves must overcome if they have hopes of battling their way back into a playoff position.

Coach Scott Barney and company would dearly love to set the tone for their eight game set with the Colts, a series that sees half of those contests being played in the month of November.

Though the Wolves lost the season series to Barrie last year after posting a 6-1-0-1 mark against the Colts in 2023-2024, they were more than competitive from start to finish, walking away with at least one point in five of the eight head to head tilts (3-3-2-0). The early days in this series were not kind to the Wolves, who suffered four straight losses to the Colts in Sudbury before finally walking away with a victory in the second year of existence for the Barrie side.

The Sudbury Wolves are still about 14 games or so on the wrong side of the .500 mark when we look at the entirety of their 226 games to date against the Peterborough Petes – but they certainly cannot blame recent history for that. The nickel city lads have captured the season series in five of the past six years, posting an overall record of 16-7-0-0 against Peterborough since the start of the 2018-2019 campaign.

After having a nine game home winning streak snapped back in Novembert 2023, the Wolves split a pair of clashes at the Old Barn on Elgin Street last year, besting the Petes 5-2 in their northern Ontario game in October of 2024.

Some of Sudbury’s top defensive efforts the past two years have come opposite the Peterborough Petes, though typically on the road, recording a shutout in the Lift Lock City in both 2023-2024 and 2024-2025. One has to go back to March 11th (2018) to locate the last clean sheet that the Wolves have recorded opposite the Petes on home ice as Marshall Frappier turned aside 27 shots to backstop Sudbury to a 4-0 win.

Defenseman Liam Ross scored a pair of goals that night to lift the Wolves to victory, joined on the scoresheet by Macauley Carson and Blake Murray.