AMHERST — When the regular season ends in March, UMass might look back on Friday night with regret.
The seventh-ranked Minutemen let a point slip away on their home ice in a game they should have won several times. There were plenty of moments when it felt like UMass was going to lock in and assert its dominance over Merrimack, it just never materialized.
UMass had plenty of chances to pull away from Merrimack as well with four power plays, a tiebreaking goal in the third period and a goal wiped out in overtime. Instead, the game ended in a 2-2 tie that felt more like a loss for the home team.
“There was a lack of a lot of stuff,” UMass coach Greg Carvel said. “A lack of urgency, a lack of compete, a lack of structure and it didn’t feel good from the drop of the puck to the final horn.”
UMass had every reason to believe it had won the game 42 seconds into overtime when Bobby Trivigno barreled in on goal and slipped the puck into the net. The referees ruled it a good goal on the ice and the Minutemen (7-3-1, 3-3-1 Hockey East) held a victory mosh pit behind the Merrimack goal. Yet the officials went to review the tally and ended up overturning the call on the ice.
“I thought it was going to be a good goal,” Carvel said. “They said he prevented the goalie from playing the puck in the crease. I guess I don’t know the rule there, but I thought (we) kept playing. (We) were prepared for a call either way.”
The Minutemen had their wake-up call early in the game as Merrimack (2-7-2, 1-3-2 HEA) scored a little more than five minutes into the action. But before the Warriors could fully process taking the lead, Mitchell Chaffee buried a rebound off a Colin Felix shot to tie the game 12 seconds later.
It was the type of play that should have sent a jolt of energy through the UMass bench that lasted for the final 54 minutes of regulation. But instead, UMass never capitalized on the momentum shift and squandered it away, reverting back to the inconsistent, unfocused hockey that put them at a deficit in the first place.
“We should build off of it,” Chaffee said. “Especially going down in our building, when we bounce back like that, we should build off of it. … It was unfortunate we couldn’t bounce back from that.”
Where UMass struggled the most was converting on its power plays, failing to score on all four man advantages. The Minutemen picked up advantages early in both the first and third periods, but didn’t do much to trouble Merrimack’s Troy Kobryn. The opening power play was the best chances UMass had to score, but it lacked the finesse to finish around the net when it had the chance.
The Minutemen are now 3 of 23 on the power play this month and operating at just a 14-percent clip this season. It’s a far cry from the dominant power play they had last season, but it’s an area of concern because of how many times they’ve struggled to generate quality chances while up a man.
“We’ve just got to bear down,” junior John Leonard said. “We know exactly what we want to do. We’re watching the pre-scout on what they’re going to do and we’re trying to make adjustments so we find things that work. It’s on us to figure it out and get pucks to the net. We’ve just got to be a little more hungry out there and not want to make the pretty plays and just get pucks to the net.”
Perhaps the only reason UMass didn’t trail after the Chaffee goal was the play of goalie Filip Lindberg. The sophomore only had to make 24 saves, but many of them were critical saves at crucial moments of the game. They might not have been acrobatic or breathtaking, but the type of big save that can help jumpstart a team.
Lindberg’s most memorable save of the game came right after Matthew Kessel gave the Minutemen the lead late in the third period. With UMass on the penalty kill, Lindberg stopped a shot from straight on then slid to his right across the crease to stop an attempt off the rebound from a Warriors player with his pad. It preserved the UMass lead for just a tiny bit longer
“He made some big, big saves and that’s what we need in games where we’re not at our best,” Carvel said.
The Kessel wrist shot was seemingly going to hold up until UMass committed yet another brainless blunder in the closing minutes of the game. In a scrum along the board to Lindberg’s right, Philip Lagunov came in hard from behind and was assessed a cross-checking penalty with two and a half minutes left. It’s the type of hit Carvel said he has told his team countless times it cannot afford to make, and it came at the most critical of times.
Merrimack scored 24 seconds into the advantage to tie the game, the last solid opportunity it had for the rest of the contest.
“We can’t take a penalty like that,” Chaffee said. “It’s unacceptable, to take a penalty that late in the game from behind like that. We can’t be doing that.”