After watching his team out-shoot, out-hit and, bluntly, out-play Boston University for all but the final six minutes of last night’s game at Walter Brown Arena, University of Massachusetts at Lowell hockey coach Blaise McDonald had a question.
‘Whose idea was it to keep score?’ he asked.
It was a legitimate query, considering the only facet of the game in which McDonald’s River Hawks didn’t dominate was the one that matters most, as the No. 10 Terriers rallied from a 1-0 deficit with 5:53 remaining to escape with a 3-2 win.
‘Certainly, [BU] didn’t put forth their best effort tonight,’ McDonald said. ‘But a sign of a good team is a team that sticks to it and takes whatever breaks they can get and makes their breaks, and certainly they did that at key times.’
Managing only 10 shots through two periods and 17 for the game, the Terriers did certainly make the most of their opportunities. After Lowell’s Mark Concannon tied the game with 2:13 to go, BU junior forward Kenny Magowan tipped in the winner with 47.6 seconds to play as the Icedogs (6-3-2, 4-3-0 Hockey East) avoided their first three-game losing streak since March 2001 and kept the River Hawks (4-8-0, 0-7-0) winless in league play.
The decisive score, Magowan’s first of the year, came when he redirected a Bryan Miller one-timer past goalie Chris Davidson. Junior Frantisek Skladany started the play by rushing the puck through the neutral zone along the right-side boards, where he put on the brakes and held the puck before drifting toward the middle.
The defense bit, and while shielding the puck as he carried it toward the slot, Skladany dropped a soft pass to Miller, who skated into his shot and unloaded a slapper toward the front of the net. Magowan was there, keeping his stick loose of a struggle with defenseman Baptiste Amar and getting a piece of the puck to tip it past Davidson’s right skate.
Until the final flurry, highlighted by Magowan’s heroics, the game was a showcase for the effectiveness of Lowell’s conservative style. Lowell aggressively forechecked BU and pressured the Terriers in their own zone, but once the Icedogs advanced the puck, the River Hawks packed into the defensive zone and limited BU’s scoring chances.
‘Two things really impressed me about the game: first, how well [BU goalie Sean] Fields played. And second, how well Lowell played goal,’ said BU coach Jack Parker. ‘They really blocked a lot of shots. They frustrated us. An awful lot of times we didn’t even get shots off, they just got our sticks.’
Parker said without Fields being on top of his game, Lowell could have had a 7-0 lead through two periods. The junior made 12 stops in the first and 14 in the second, keeping the Icedogs in the game as their stagnant offense struggled unlike any other time this season. Through its first five home dates, BU was 2-2-1, but every opposing goalie had to make at least 30 stops. Davidson finished with 14.
Eventually BU did manage to pressure Davidson, but not until after Lowell sharpshooter Ed McGrane notched his 11th goal of the season with 1:28 to play in the middle stanza, a power-play slap shot that burnt Fields high to his glove side.
But if you stumbled into the Arena at about 9 last night, you wouldn’t have missed too much. You would have been just in time for the final 10 minutes, you could have found a seat and you would have seen BU’s leaders lead a comeback reminiscent of last season’s deficit-diffusing Icedogs.
‘I thought we were very frustrated as the game went on,’ Parker said. ‘They were doing such a great job on us, they were winning the game down low at both ends. We had a hard time getting the puck away from them in our end, we had a hard time getting control of the puck in their end.’
The first 50 minutes were filled with strategically boring hockey, dictated by Lowell’s insistence to keep BU from exploiting its talent advantage, McDonald said. Lowell was in control until senior John Sabo got BU on the board late in the third.
Sabo took the puck from Justin Maiser’s skates in the corner, and darted between the goal and the defender as he carried the puck to the front of the net. Before he had the chance to circle, however, Sabo went airborne, re-gripping his stick in the process, and backhandedly jamming the puck through the five-hole to tie the game at one.
‘That first goal of the third period, Sabo’s goal, was an absolutely great play,’ Parker said.
Just 38 seconds later, captain Freddy Meyer gave BU its first lead of the night, scoring from the point with 5:15 on the clock. Assistant captain Brian Collins won the draw back to Meyer, who slid to the middle immediately, and as Davidson slid with him, unloaded a low slap shot to the small space between pad and post.
But 2:02 later, Meyer was unable to corral a puck in the slot in front of Fields, leaving Concannon alone with the netminder, who tucked it under the goalie’s stick.
‘I like getting a ‘W’, I like only giving up two goals – a lot of that had to do with how well our goaltender played,’ said Parker, who said the ugly win could be a character builder for his team. ‘[Lowell] did a great job forechecking, but as the game progressed and we kept competing, we got over our frustration.’
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