You’ll often hear coaches and athletes say they learn more from losses than they do from wins.
To hear Arizona State coach Greg Powers say it during his team’s press conference Tuesday, the Sun Devils took important lessons from the back end of a split last weekend.
ASU had won five of its last six games heading into the then 11th-ranked Sun Devils’ home series with a Colorado College team that had been going in the opposite direction, losing five of the Tigers’ last six. That run continued Friday when three second-period goals helped ASU to a 4-1 win, but on Saturday, the Sun Devils let a 4-1 lead slip before falling 5-4.
“We have to flush it, obviously, but it’s not something that we can forget,” Powers said. “When something like that happens, and to be honest, we probably didn’t deserve to be up 4-1, I thought CC played a better game Saturday, and credit to them for not going away, and doing what they did. I think it speaks a lot about their character and their resolve, trying to course-correct where they’re at in their season.
“We have a decision: We can let that get the train off the tracks, which I know it’s not going to, or we can let things like that happen and learn from it and grow from it and make sure it doesn’t ever happen again, and that’s exactly what we plan on doing with it.”
ASU had revenge on its mind Friday, having fallen twice on the road against CC earlier this season. In the teams’ third meeting, the Sun Devils got goals from four different skaters. Beating the No. 19 Tigers that night also gave ASU its seventh straight win over a ranked opponent.
Saturday’s rematch looked to be going in a similar direction, as two goals apiece from Ryan Kirwan and Charlie Schoen gave ASU a three-goal cushion with under 14 minutes to go. But after CC’s Noah Laba cut into the deficit at 6:24, Chase McLane made it 4-3 less than a minute later, and it was a different game. Max Burkholder tied it at 11:28 before Drew Montgomery netted the eventual winner at 14:37.
“There’s nothing you can do in practice to defend leads,” Powers said Tuesday. “It’s a mindset and a killer instinct, and it’s something that this team has not perfected yet.
“I think the good news is we know we’re really good and we know we’re going to be out in front quite a bit, and we have all year, but it’s developing that killer instinct to go out and end games, and extend and continue to skate and continue to defend, kill plays and do everything the right way when other teams have to press and they’re down, and we just didn’t do that Saturday.
“You can preach mindset. You can work on it and you can develop it, absolutely. They have it in them. We’ve done it. We did it against North Dakota on Friday night (a 4-1 home win Jan. 10), we did it against Cornell (a 4-0 home win Jan. 4), we certainly did it against Denver at Denver (a road sweep in November). They have it in them, they’ve proven they can do it, they just have to do it down the stretch, because it’s an important stretch for us.”
The Sun Devils now prepare for a road trip to NCHC basement-dweller Miami. ASU should be heavily favored against a RedHawks team that has lost its last 16 games.
Clearly, though, Powers is taking nothing for granted.
“We don’t focus on them, we focus on us,” he said. “There’s enough there to focus on after what we pi$$ed away on Saturday night.”
