The two losses dropped the Icedogs to third-place in the conference, with the Wildcats extending their lead over BU to six points.
In both games, the Wildcats were clearly the better team, demonstrating an incredible arsenal of weaponry in a 6-1 victory at the Whittemore Center on Friday night and their resiliency and poise in their 5-3 win Sunday night at Walter Brown Arena.
After giving up a power-play goal to Josh Prudden at 5:49 in the first period Sunday, BU held fast and finally evened things up with 50 seconds to play.
The Icedogs sustained pressure on the Wildcats’ defensive end, and in a mad scramble in front of the net, the puck trickled behind New Hampshire goalie Michael Ayers. As the Wildcats furiously protested, complaining that sophomore center Gregg Johnson had interfered with Ayers, referee John Gravellese allowed the goal, which was eventually credited to sophomore forward Frantisek Skladany, his 11th of the season.
With 10 seconds left in the opening frame, junior defenseman Freddy Meyer put the Icedogs on top with his second goal of the year. Senior forward Mike Pandolfo set up the play with great hustle, beating a New Hampshire defender to the puck after sophomore forward Mark Mullen banked it off the boards through the neutral zone. Pandolfo shoveled the puck to the middle while holding off the defenseman with one arm, where Meyer flew in and deposited a low-wrister through the five-hole.
New Hampshire struck next early in the second frame. Freshman defenseman Bryan Miller tried to intercept a pass from New Hampshire forward Justin Aikins, but freshman forward Ed Caron got to the puck first and moved in alone on sophomore goalie Sean Fields, sliding a shot under Fields to even the score at two.
Less than five minutes later, junior forward John Sabo gave BU the lead for the final time with his fourth goal of the season. As junior center Brian Collins brought the puck from behind the net, Sabo took a whack at it and popped it past Ayers. The other assist went to senior forward Jack Baker.
From there, Fields took over, twice stoning New Hampshire forward Colin Hemingway, the third leading scorer in the nation, on point-blank chances.
And then the third period came.
“I thought we played real well till the third period, then I thought we got unbelievably jumpy,” said BU coach Jack Parker.
It didn’t take long for New Hampshire to level things, with Caron notching his second on a back-hand wraparound 2:08 into the period.
Prudden put the Wildcats in the lead for good with three minutes left, taking a great feed from defenseman Garret Stafford that put him behind the BU blue liners. Prudden walked in alone on Fields and beat him far side after a beautiful deke.
“After they tied it up, we played OK for a while, but then as the period went on, we couldn’t complete a pass,” Parker said. “I was really disappointed in our lack of poise, real disappointed in some guys who just disappeared as the third period progressed.
“The two goals we gave up were just real bad situations, real bad individual plays.”
With BU desperate to score, senior defenseman Pat Aufiero carried the puck in close, where his wrister labeled for the upper right-hand corner was snagged by Ayers in his best Dominic Hasek imitation.
From there the game got uglier, with tempers boiling over and several mini-fracases resulting from two heated games in three days. The atmosphere became truly deplorable after many BU fans reacted to taunts from Ayers by littering the ice with water bottles and other debris.
Overshadowed by the extracurriculars was New Hampshire captain Darren Haydar’s 24th goal of the term, an empty-netter with only a second remaining that extended his point streak to 17 games.
The ugliness of Sunday’s end had precedent, as the Icedogs’ performance on Friday showed the Wildcats to be a far superior team in a 6-1 drubbing.
After eight minutes of feeling each other out, New Hampshire struck first when Hemingway knocked down senior defenseman Chris Dyment’s clearing pass through the middle and wristed a hard shot past Fields’ glove for his 18th goal.
Hemingway struck again less than two minutes later. After a BU turnover at New Hampshire’s blueline, Mick Mounsey got the puck to Prudden, who sent Hemingway in alone again on Fields, and the junior repeated what had worked earlier, putting another glove-side wrister past Fields.
“Once they got the first two goals on the two little turnovers by us, we just wilted, and they just kept coming at us,” Parker said.
With a minute left in the period, the Wildcats struck again, with defenseman Tyson Teplitzky putting in a low shot from the slot after the Wildcats cycled the puck in the Terrier zone.
In the second period, the Icedogs grabbed their lone goal of the night, a power-play job by freshman center Brian McConnell, his seventh of the year, with assists going to Miller and Meyer.
Meyer was one of the only BU players who didn’t slump in front of the hostile Whittemore Center crowd, playing solid defense throughout the night and continuing to play hard long after the result of the game was beyond doubt.
David Busch’s goal, a redirection at the far post, was the first nail on the coffin for the Icedogs, and any energy that could have been summoned in a fight back from two goals down seemed to disappear when the scenario became three-to-tie.
Steve Saviano sealed the coffin when he scored with only 42.5 seconds left in the second, making the New Hampshire lead 5-1.
All that was left for the Wildcats was for Haydar to score, which he did when freshman blue liner Ryan Whitney gifted him a puck, which Haydar calmly deposited past senior Jason Tapp — brought on ostensibly to save Fields from any more morale-killing odd-man rushes and defenseman giveaways.
“It was unbelievable what we did with the puck,” Parker said. “You can’t win games when you pass it to the other club, and you can’t win games when you can’t cover people in their own zone.”
One play in particular seemed to showcase the general BU ineptitude of the night. After a New Hampshire forward had knocked a puck down into the BU zone with a high stick, giving Whitney a chance to clear the puck away with no interference, the rookie knocked the puck weakly back to the Wildcat, giving New Hampshire another odd-man rush.
Unsurprisingly, Parker was less than happy with his team’s performance.
“That was an old-fashioned whooping,” Parker said. “The difference in the ability of both teams — our inablity to cover them while they’re making great plays in our zone, and our inability to make a pass while coming through center ice in their zone — was much more than a 6-1 game.
“It could have been 12-1.”
Perhaps the only overall positive — other than Meyer’s noticeably improved form following a season-long funk, and the inspired play of many, especially Sabo and Baker on Sunday — was BU’s ability to hold Haydar, the leading candidate for the Hobey Baker award, to two garbage-time goals that essentially meant nothing.
While the statistics may be favorable — a two goal weekend — the reality was that Haydar was mostly ineffective. The same could not be said of his teammates.
“We tried to take away number 20, and it was the only thing that worked halfway decent tonight,” Parker said on Friday night. “He didn’t score until the third period, when we stopped doing that.
“Hemingway didn’t notice that Haydar wasn’t there tonight — neither did the rest of the UNH forwards, who I thought played great.”
While Parker was disappointed in his team’s lack of composure, he attributed much of that jumpiness to New Hampshire.
“A lot of it is how good UNH is,” Parker said. “They took five out of a possible six points against us.”
After the weekend beating, BU has a chance to right the ship before the Beanpot, playing two games against Merrimack College, Hockey East’s second-worst team. For Parker, two games are much preferred to the other alternative.
“It’s always good to keep playing,” the coach said. “At this time of year, you don’t want to keep practicing. We don’t need practice; we need to get poised and more mentally sure of ourselves.”
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