For 10 days, Matt Murray held the UMass career record for shutouts by himself.
The junior goalie set the record on Nov. 30 in a 3-0 road win over Quinnipiac, his sixth career shutout. But on Dec. 10, sophomore Filip Lindberg turned away 27 shots for his sixth career shutout in a 4-0 blanking of Brown.
All season long, the two goalies have traded strong performances in goal for the Minutemen, neither one willing to cede the net. As No. 9 UMass begins the second half of its season Sunday at 5 p.m. against RPI, the competition between Lindberg and Murray is still strong.
Both rank in the top 10 nationally in goals against average and in the top 20 for save percentage with statistics that any team would be grateful to have from their goalie.
“Both goalies have been playing really well, and that’s a good thing,” Lindberg said after the win over Brown. “There’s a good competition going on between us and I feel like that’s something that pushes both of us in our games.”
UMass is one of eight teams in the country allowing fewer than two goals per game, but the only one without a goalie playing more than 90 percent of the team’s minutes. The Minutemen have stuck with the goalie rotation between Lindberg and Murray through the first half of the season, and the playing time has basically been even between the two.
It’s exactly what coach Greg Carvel expected when he set out his plan to play both goalies until one won the job outright. He had wanted both goalies to still be in the competition come January, and both of them have shown why they could be the No. 1 goalie this season.
“That’s how we envisioned it,” Carvel said after the win over Brown. “You’ve got two really good goalies and you hope they keep pushing each other, and that’s exactly what’s happening. They’ve pushed each other.”
The win over Brown was an important one for Lindberg to re-establish himself within the goaltending competition. After the sophomore took the loss against Quinnipiac at home, Murray received both starts the next weekend against Maine and continued his strong play. It was the first time all season the same goalie started both games of a weekend series, and the first outward sign that someone had taken a lead in the competition.
Yet all Lindberg did in his final start before the break was make big save after big save to stonewall the Bears. The sophomore said he didn’t use Murray’s starts against Maine as fuel for the game, and simply continued his normal process for preparing for a game and letting his own mentality set the tone.
“It doesn’t matter, I just focus on the game that’s given to me,” Lindberg said. “I focus on my own game when I get the start and it doesn’t matter how anyone else plays before me.”
Carvel — or perhaps more accurately assistant coach Jared DeMichiel — will need to make a decision at some point about who should start in the postseason, but there’s no reason to rush that choice. Even when it looks like one goalie might be taking a slight edge, the other has raised his level of play. And both goalies have handled adversity well this season after being pulled early from games.
Murray was yanked midway through a 4-3 loss to Boston University on Nov. 15 after allowing three goals on 10 shots. He responded by allowing just two goals over his next four appearances, which included the shutout against Quinnipiac.
Meanwhile, Lindberg was pulled midway through an eventual 3-2 win over Merrimack the following weekend when he allowed two goals on 12 shots. The Finnish goalie took a hard-luck loss in his next start against Quinnipiac before pitching the shutout against Brown.
“You go back a few weeks where I pulled Matt Murray halfway through a game and he didn’t think it was fair then I pulled Fille Lindberg two goals into the game and he didn’t think it was fair,” Carvel said. “They have the understanding that they have to elevate and they both have.”