NORTH ANDOVER, Mass. — Merrimack cruised to a 10-0 victory on Sunday afternoon against Arizona State and in the process, snapped a 10-game losing streak that dated back to Dec. 29.
“First, I’d like to thank coach [Greg] Powers and Arizona State for playing three in a row,” said Merrimack coach Mark Dennehy. “I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. I’d also like to welcome Arizona State to Division I hockey. It’s great for for college hockey.
“We’ve been struugling and I thought our guys came out ready to play. I thought we had a lot of puck luck and we stuck with what we needed to do and got the job done.”
The goals came right away for Merrimack when Derek Petti scored his first NCAA goal just 38 seconds in when he came down and went right to left to beat Rayland Pashovitz to take the 1-0 lead.
What proved to be the insurance marker came when Mathieu Tibbet scored off of a backhand for the 2-0 lead.
Just five minutes later, Ben Bahe took a shot on net that was tipped in from teammate Brian Christie for the 3-0 advantage. Mathieu Foget added a fourth goal when he went on a partial breakaway and went side to side to score. In the final 90 seconds of the period, Chris LeBlanc scored on the power play on a backhand shot to go into the second period leading 5-0.
LeBlanc got things started in the second period, scoring on the man advantage to put his team up 6-0. Alex Carle added a goal on the power play when he fired a shot from the top of the dots to give Merrimack the 7-0 lead. Tibbet scored his second goal of the game midway through the period and then the period ended with Michael Babcock scoring to send the game to 9-0 heading into the final period.
The third period saw Merrimack add a tenth goal when Petti scored his second of the game and his fifth point of the night.
“It’s a great team win,” said Petti. “It’s going to help a lot. No matter who we played, we wanted to come out as a unit and play hard and we we were ready to go right off the get-go. It’s unbelievable [scoring his first NCAA goal] – you dream about moments like that and for it to finally come was amazing.”
