Ilya Protas absorbed a cheap shot from Lehigh Valley Phantoms forward, Garrett Wilson, late in the first period, sending the 6-foot-6 centerman careening to the ice. He struggled to get up.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt hurt real bad after I got hit,\u201d Protas said postgame. \u201cRight away.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Protas made his way back to the Bears bench, and after doing some twirls on the ice during the stoppage in play, he remained in the game.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter I came to the room and had that intermission, it helped me a lot to kind of rest and get back full recovery,\u201d he said. \u201cThe trainers helped during the intermission, and I put some ice and I felt great afterwards though.\u201d<\/p>\n
Protas returned the favor in the best possible way later: on the scoreboard. The Belarusian forward scored the game-winning shootout goal, after teasing forehand and then beating Phantoms goaltender Carson Bjarnason on a stunning backhand tally.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s another look.<\/p>\n
For notching the shootout game-winner, Protas was named the First Star of the Game.<\/p>\n
Inside the locker room after the game, he was also awarded the Hershey firefighter outfit as player of the game by goaltender Clay Stevenson.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m going to give this one to Pro,\u201d Stevenson said to roars from the team. \u201cAbsolute warrior.\u201d<\/p>\n
Little Pro put the firefighter helmet on backward.<\/p>\n
\u201cBoys, unreal job. Just keep it going!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ilya Protas absorbed a cheap shot from Lehigh Valley Phantoms forward, Garrett Wilson, late in the first period,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":252803,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-252802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/252803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}