Minnesota Duluth fell 4-2 to Western Michigan on Saturday in NCHC play at Amsoil Arena in Duluth. Combined with the shootout loss on Friday to Western, the Bulldogs only earned one out of six league points this weekend.
Here are my thumbs up and thumbs down from Saturday’s game, followed by my three stars of the game.
Thumbs up to this weekend hopefully being a huge learning experience for UMD
Going into the weekend, I thought the Bulldogs’ speed and skill would trounce the Broncos’ size and strength. I was wrong. Instead WMU coach Andy Murray and his Broncos were able to use their size and strength to contain the speed and skill that has given the rest of the country fits this season. There were very few odd-man breaks. There were little-to-no chances to get cute and deke out defenders. When the Bulldogs were able to maintain possession in the Broncos’ zone, it was short lived and a bumpy ride.
Remember when defenders in the NFL were once allowed to touch receivers and play bump and run coverage? That’s what Western did this weekend.
UMD wasn’t use to that kind of game. Senior wing Justin Crandall said after the game that UMD hadn’t seen a team like this yet this season. Now the Bulldogs have and they can hopefully learn from it.
This is still a very, very good hockey team here in Duluth. It’s much, much more skilled than the team that took five-of-six points this weekend at Amsoil. It’s just that the Broncos executed their game plan better and prevented UMD from executing theirs more times than not.
The Bulldogs play the Broncos again in seven weeks in Kalamazoo, Mich. We’ll see then if UMD learned anything from this weekend, or if Murray has something else up his sleeve.
“That was a different challenge for us,” Crandall said. “We haven’t played a team like that all year.
“You have to find a way to win games no matter who you are playing. That’s a good test … we have time to correct it still and there are going to be teams down the road that play like that. We have to get ready to play teams that play gritty like that.”
Thumbs down to the UMD penalty kill
Special teams decided the series this weekend. Four of the Broncos five goals came via special teams with one coming 4-on-4, another 5-on-3 and the two Saturday during your average 5-on-4 advantage. Meanwhile, UMD was held to just one power play goal on Friday.
The Broncos power play was especially deadly on Saturday, finishing 2-for-4 with 11 shots on goal. WMU only put 27 shots on goal all game. Nine of those 11 power play shots came during two first-period advantages.
You could call the second power play goal for Western on Saturday lucky since the Bulldogs had cleared the puck from their own zone, but instead of going to the opposite end of the rink like it should have, the puck hit a linesman. With UMD changing, a Bronco came off the bench, skated into the UMD zone and scored with ease.
The thing is, you create your own luck, and UMD had been trapped in its own zone for well over a minute, maybe even a minute and a half at that point. Clear the puck earlier, and there may have been a fresh enough body still on the ice to put on the breaks and stay to defend. That wasn’t the case.
Matt’s Three Stars
3. UMD sophomore wing Alex Iafallo: Iafallo made sure the Bulldogs didn’t trail the Broncos at the first intermission for the second consecutive night by scoring on a backhanded shot on a breakaway with less than four minutes to play in the first period. This was a key goal that gave UMD confidence going into the second period and erased the fact that Western had once again taken a 1-0 lead on UMD.
2. WMU junior wing Nolan LaPorte: Had the Bulldogs gotten the first goal instead of the Broncos, this game could have turned out very differently. Instead, LaPorte’s power play tally left the Bulldogs chasing the Broncos all night long. LaPorte finished the weekend with two goals, an assist, a shootout goal and a very short lived leg injury that got the Bulldogs leading scorer suspended Dominic Toninato suspended for Saturday’s game.
1. WMU junior goaltender Lukas Hafner: The Broncos skaters did an excellent job clogging up the Bulldogs attack this weekend, but the team still needed its goaltender to stand tall and make every save he could. You can’t completely shut down a team like UMD, but you can contain it. His 24 saves during regulation and two more in a shootout on Friday, plus the 25 on Saturday were just enough to contain the Bulldogs.