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.

Starting the 2026-2027 with five consecutive victories has been nice for the Sudbury Wolves – historically nice, to be honest, given that the stretch represents an all-time franchise best. That said, with four of those five victories coming at home, it’s time to see just how well their game plays on the road as Sudbury contests five of their next six outings away outside the nickel city.

Coach Scott Barney and company will be looking to snap a seven-game winless streak in North Bay when they battle the Battalion on Thursday night in the first of two games on back to back nights for The Pack. It was October of 2024 when the Wolves opened their eight-game season series with the Troops with a 4-3 overtime win as Kieron Walton deftly stickhandled his way to the game-winning goal.

It’s not all that hard to identify the biggest area of concern for the Sudbury side in their recent struggles with North Bay, with the local juniors having scored more than two goals only once in the past seven games with their rivals, and not at all in their past six (2-0-2-1-1-2). Still, despite their run of hard luck putting the puck in the net versus the Battalion, the Wolves still managed to walk away with season bragging rights in 2024-2025 thanks to a four-game sweep of North Bay in Sudbury.

With 97 games in this series already played in Sudbury and 98 in North Bay, the tete a tete will reach the century mark on both fronts this year, with the Wolves playing roughly .500 hockey at home but winning only perhaps three out of ten times in the Gateway City. While the teams have had nine games decided by way of a shootout, only one such occurrence has happened since the last day of December (2013) and now.

On January 25th (2024), trade deadline acquisition and local product Zacharie Giroux ended a 12 player shootout, solving Dom DiVincentiis and propelling the visiting Wolves to a 5-4 win. Dalibor Dvorsky, David Goyette, Quentin Musty and Kocha Delic scored for Sudbury on a 2023-2024 team that was gifted with as much offensive firepower as any local OHL unit in the past quarter century.

In the 28 years since the Peterborough Petes and Sudbury Wolves began playing a four-game season series with each team hosting twice, never have the first two Peterborough visits to northern Ontario ever been completed, for the year, by October 9th. On three different occasions, the Petes made their second and final trek to the nickel city during the first week of November – with November 2nd 2019 marking the earliest of those dates.

Notwithstanding having their season cut short due to Covid, the Wolves would likely very much like to see the 2019-2020 duplicated or perhaps bettered in 2026-2027, with the team capturing a divisional banner in the shortened campaign. Moreover, the Wolves swept Peterborough that year with victories of 9-6 (October 4th 2019) and 5-2 (November 2nd 2019), that latter triumph sparked by a well-balanced attack that featured goals from Blake Murray, Kosta Manikis, David Levin, Quinton Byfield and Nolan Hutcheson.

After edging the Petes 2-1 in their season opener this fall back on September 18th, the Pack will have a chance to sweep the home set of this series for the first time since 2022-2023, a season that saw Sudbury defeat Peterborough eight stratight times at home. The last time that the Wolves racked up a 2-1 home ice win over the Petes, before this year was in a contest held on February 4th (2001).

In that encounter, Sudbury overcame a 1-0 deficit heading into period three as Alexei Semenov and Jason Jaspers lit the lamp just 28 seconds apart as Mike Smith earned the win in net with a 30-save performance.